Les Bonnes Choses

Judging by the feedback I received on my blog's facebook alter ego, many of you already knew that newspaper was an effective window cleaner. I suppose that shouldn't be surprising, since so many who left comments are bordering on old age, and no doubt remember back in the day, when nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. "Gimme five bees for a quarter," you'd say. Now where was I...?

Oh yeah, so just to make a stark juxtaposition with yesterday's old-timey tip, I'm going to tell you a little something about the browser you're using to read this blog. Now, because of my background as a cyborg, I've been parachuted into many a situation where a computer needs a good fixin'. Sometimes the hardware is fried. Other times, the culprit is the dancing hamster screensaver that seemed like a good idea at the time. In most cases, however, if the computer is starting up, one thing I'm likely to do is use the browser to do something. They've gotten to be really helpful at suggesting where you might want to go, often based on your browser history. And boy-howdy, is it ever awkward when I start to type "www." only to have the browser suggest "midgetsinlatex.com/memberlogin.asp".

So, okay, that's one socially related reason to rethink whether you want your browser keeping track of your history. But I recently came across a privacy-related reason. I've always been wary of the browser history, not because I'm afraid of someone finding out I'm big into the cosplay scene (go ahead, click the link. It's safe for work, and just weird), but rather, because I'm never 100% sure that some bank-related information won't be useful in perpetrating some kind of fraud. It turns out that my hunch was right, but for a different reason. A person can belong to lots very large groups, but very few individuals will belong to a large set of groups. For example, how many males are there out there? Billions. That's a big group. How many of them are in North America? Still quite a few, but less than a billion. And of those, how many of them are Aerosmith fans? Tens of thousands? How many of those guys also watch Glee? Run marathons?

It turns out that social websites like Facebook make it quite easy to figure out who you are, especially if you visit Facebook fan sites, because your browser happily reveals to anyone whether your browser history contains any given entry. So if you've visited Farmville, checked out the Twilight fan page and then commented on Lilo's parole, your browser might be giving you away. Aside from compromising your privacy, I don't know whether being able to personally identify you is particularly useful, but if the idea of it bothers you, you should look into clearing your browser history, and making sure it doesn't record it.

And that, my friends, is my PSA for the day. Speaking of PSA... (NSFW language)