If you’re daydreaming about buying a home or need to lower the payment on the one you already have, you might pay a visit to the Quicken Loans mortgage calculator. You’ll be asked a quick succession of questions that reveal how much cash you have on hand or how much your home is worth and how close you are to paying it off. Then Quicken will tell you how much you’d owe per month if you got a loan from them and asks for your name, email address, and phone number.
You might fill in the contact form, but then have second thoughts. Do you really want to tell this company how much you’re worth or how in debt you are? You change your mind and close the page before clicking the Submit button and agreeing to Quicken’s privacy policy.
But it’s too late. Your email address and phone number have already been sent to a server at “murdoog.com,” which is owned by NaviStone, a company that advertises its ability to unmask anonymous website visitors and figure out their home addresses. NaviStone’s code on Quicken’s site invisibly grabbed each piece of your information as you filled it out, before you could hit the “Submit” button.
Actually I've always assumed this was happening.
It’s very hard to do anything on the web with any degree of anonymity. I’m sure things like this are the tip of the iceberg although it may actually be very close to an illegal practice in the EU (which the UK will soon be free of! Yay!)
On a related note I’d be happy to pay for an ad-free and track-free Internet service but advertisers carry so much weight and own so much of the bloody web (Google) that it’s a pipe dream.
This is not how the web was envisaged. Unscrupulous and immoral: nothing is sacred online.
imagine a web without AJAX…
This is appalling, and I hadn’t always assumed it, but I will now.
cleek, I love your new subheading, or whatever it’s called. I’ve been listening a lot to Graceland recently, and still think it’s a masterpiece. I knew some snotty, highly superior New Yorkers when it came out, who were all “Oh for heaven’s sake, he’s just exploiting real township music”, which of course they were, being highly superior, signalling they were already familiar with (as in fact was I because of my South African family) but I thought they were wrong then and history has gone on to prove their view absurd. Paul Simon had questions to answer for breaking the cultural boycott, but apart from everything else, masterpieces are their own justification.
i was 15 when Graceland came out, so i knew nothing of the politics around it. and i definitely didn’t know anything about any kind of African music. i just knew that whatever Simon was playing around with was wonderful. that album introduced a lot of new styles of music to me, and to millions of other people.
Peter Gabriel had been dipping in that well years before Simon got there. but his stuff was still too avant garde to reach the huge audience that Simon was able to.