Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> wrote:
there's also a trend to make sites impossible to use without javascript.
Yes, I've noticed this. Evil. ;->
Agreed. Then they make it worse by ignoring W3C specifications (in particular, Aria) so that when I do visit the site with a Javascript-capable browser, it still isn't accessible.
we're pretty much at the point where if you want to read something online, you have to allow it to read you too.
I'm still fighting the good fight.
Excellent.
most users don't know, and don't care. worse, they don't even know that they should care, least of all WHY they should care.
Quite so.
We need good, well publicised examples of how the information collected can be (and preferably has been) misused by some site operators. There are more subtle issues as well. For example, I heard it mentioned that in one particular study, researchers demonstrated how they could corrolate information extracted from photographs posted on the Web by different parties to make relatively reliable inferences about who the friends and associates were of the people depicted in the images. I searched the Web but failed to find the citation. As I remember, determining the approximate time and location in which each photograph was taken and identifying the people depicted was enough to reveal interesting information about social graphs that none of those who posted the images would have intended to disclose by doing so.