# Data Miners & Ad Blockers



## Son_of_Perdition (Jun 6, 2015)

I use Firefox for my browser, I installed the ABP app to block advertising.  This morning I added 'Ghostery' on a lark.  I'm learning the app and all it can do.  It's amazing what it catches as far as the websites that track your browsing.  I'm in the process of disabling just the advertising data miners.  My point being that ABP doesn't get down deep enough for my paranoia.  The journey continues.....

*Data Mining* 

Over the last decade, advances in processing power and speed have enabled companies to move beyond manual, tedious and time-consuming practices to quick, easy and automated data analysis. The more complex the data sets collected, the more potential there is to uncover relevant insights. Retailers, banks, manufacturers, telecommunications providers and insurers, among others, are using data mining to discover relationships among everything from pricing, promotions and demographics to how the economy, risk, competition and social media are affecting their business models, revenues, operations and customer relationships.  

There have been studies done that show the general public has resigned themselves to fact that giving your personal information is almost unavoidable and will hand over their identification more readily if they deem it is necessary to make a purchase of sign up for a service.  You have rewards cards for many stores that mine data when it's swiped.  I've found that most of the rewards are not worth their effort.  You shop at warehouse box stores handing over you card mindlessly so they can extract and analyze your buying habits and what days you are apt buy a given product. 

*Banking*

The tremendous increase in the power of information technology will enable banks to tap existing information systems, also known as legacy systems, and mine useful management information and insights from the data stored in them. This process can be done without the need to change the current systems and the data they generate. But before data mining can proceed, a data warehouse will have to be created first. Data warehousing is the process of extracting, cleaning, transforming, and standardizing incompatible data from the bank's current systems so that these data can be mined and analyzed for useful patterns, relationships, and associations. The data warehouse need not be updated as regularly or daily as the transaction based systems. Data warehouses can be updated and mined as infrequently as the need for management reports and decisions dictate, i.e., monthly, quarterly, or on a ad hoc basis. Data warehousing and mining can run parallel with banking transaction information systems, without intrusion and interruptions.

*Retail Shopping*

One of the earliest application of data mining was in retail supermarket. Mining the volumes of point of sale (POS) data generated daily by cash registers, the store management analyzed the housewife's shopping basket, and discovered which items were often bought together. This knowledge led to changes in store layout the brought the related items physically closer and better promotions that packaged and sold the related items together. The knowledge discovered also led to better stocking and inventory management. Retailers like WalMart have experienced sales increase as much as 20% after extensively applying data mining. Some frequently bought item pairs discovered by data mining may be obvious, like toothbrush and toothpaste, wine and cheese, chips and soda. Some were unexpected and bizarre like disposable diapers and beer on Friday nights.  Using credit cards enables information to used for mailings, offers based upon your purchases and gathering information about your spending habits.  Cash is hard to track!  Giving out too much information helps retailers decide what is best for you.  

*Insurance*

The potential of data mining can be of immense importance to insurance companies. A car insurance company wants to create a prediction model to predict the probability of a car accident happening within a certain period of time on the basis of customer data which is available at the time of signing the insurance policy (e.g. personal data, attributes of the car to be insured, history of accidents.). Looking at the past it is known whether past customers had an accident within a certain period of time or not. Past customers are split into different classes with respect to the costs of their claims. Therefore, a data table is available with each data record representing the data of a past customer at the beginning of a year and the customer’s claim class in that year. The prediction model is created using this data table. The prediction model also reveals interesting customer segments with a high risk of belonging to a bad claim class.


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## Ken N Tx (Jun 7, 2015)

Keep us posted on your journey..I have added Ghostery but have not done anything with it yet.. Thanks..


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## Ken N Tx (Jun 7, 2015)

I just went through some of my favorite websites and did some blocking..I was amazed that Amazon and Face Book did not show any trackers!! (???)


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## LynnD (Jun 7, 2015)

That amazes me about Facebook but that's good! What I find strange is my daughter will text or email me a pic of a dress she bought from a certain store....then later I see that same dress in my feed on Facebook ...I do "follow" that store but I find it eerie that it's always the same dress she emailed me.


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## Son_of_Perdition (Jun 7, 2015)

Ken N Tx said:


> I just went through some of my favorite websites and did some blocking..I was amazed that Amazon and Face Book did not show any trackers!! (???)


I think you'll find that sites as large & vast as FB & Amazon use their own tracking software, block others then sell their information to third party data miners.  It adds another source of income for them.  They are 2 of the largest but I'm sure there's others making money from our surfing.


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## Don M. (Jun 7, 2015)

I've used ADP and Blur for the past couple of years.  ADP has blocked over 1/2 million ads in that time, and BLUR has intercepted over 600K attempts to track my moves.  The Only "side effect" I've noticed is some URL's I might click on, when using Google Chrome as a browser, fail to load.  In that case, if I really want to look at that site, I switch over to Firefox, or IE, and the site comes up.  There seems to be some conflict between ADP and Chrome.


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## Son_of_Perdition (Jun 7, 2015)

Here's another scary wrinkle to add to my worries.  I can't attest to the accuracy of the article, whether it's fact or rumor.  But over time rumor has become fact in the tech world.

http://www.thenation.com/article/208593/you-can-be-prosecuted-clearing-your-browser-history#

[url]http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/6/8741275/browser-history-law-sarbanes-oxley
[/URL]


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## Son_of_Perdition (Jun 7, 2015)

Don M. said:


> I've used ADP and Blur for the past couple of years.  ADP has blocked over 1/2 million ads in that time, and BLUR has intercepted over 600K attempts to track my moves.  The Only "side effect" I've noticed is some URL's I might click on, when using Google Chrome as a browser, fail to load.  In that case, if I really want to look at that site, I switch over to Firefox, or IE, and the site comes up.  There seems to be some conflict between ADP and Chrome.


Chrome is a product of Google the largest data miner of them all, it's not much of a surprise that you would encounter problems with ad blocking apps.  I used Chromium (Linux version of Chrome) and dumped it after having issues, like ones you described.

I have a limited number of sites I regularly go to.  I built me a little web page for my home that gives me a menu of them with embedded links.  I decided to block everything that comes up on Ghostery.  One I was sure about is explained below.



> -- Beacons
> 
> Also called a Web bug or a pixel tag or a clear GIF. Used in combination with cookies, a Web beacon is an often-transparent graphic image, usually no larger than 1 pixel x 1 pixel, that is placed on a Web site or in an e-mail that is used to monitor the behavior of the user visiting the Web site or sending the e-mail. When the HTML code for the Web beacon points to a site to retrieve the image, at the same time it can pass along information such as the IP address of the computer that retrieved the image, the time the Web beacon was viewed and for how long, the type of browser that retrieved the image and previously set cookie values.
> 
> Web beacons are typically used by a third party to monitor the activity of a site. A Web beacon can be detected by viewing the source code of a Web page and looking for any IMG tags that load from a different server than the rest of the site. Turning off the browser's cookies will prevent Web beacons from tracking the user's activity. The Web beacon will still account for an anonymous visit, but the user's unique information will not be recorded.  --



I found that when I blocked them all I don't get the annoying vidoes slowing down my page loads.  It's cleaned up most of the eye candy and makes the pages load cleaner and easier to navigate.


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## Don M. (Jun 7, 2015)

Yeah, Google maintains some massive data centers all over the world.  The data they collect makes anything our government is doing look like child's play.  That's why I run Blur, and ABP (Not ADP...senior moment), and in addition I run Spybot and MalWareBytes.  I'm probably "over protected", but given the garbage and hackers floating around anymore, I would rather be safe than sorry.  Anymore, any time a person signs on to the Internet, or fires up their cell phone, they face the very real possibility of anything they do or say falling into the wrong hands.


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## LynnD (Jun 7, 2015)

don m. said:


> yeah, google maintains some massive data centers all over the world.  The data they collect makes anything our government is doing look like child's play.  That's why i run blur, and abp (not adp...senior moment), and in addition i run spybot and malwarebytes.  I'm probably "over protected", but given the garbage and hackers floating around anymore, i would rather be safe than sorry.  Anymore, any time a person signs on to the internet, or fires up their cell phone, they face the very real possibility of anything they do or say falling into the wrong hands.



yikes!


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## Ken N Tx (Jun 8, 2015)

Don M. said:


> Yeah, Google maintains some massive data centers all over the world.  The data they collect makes anything our government is doing look like child's play.  That's why I run Blur, and ABP (Not ADP...senior moment), and in addition I run Spybot and MalWareBytes.  I'm probably "over protected", but given the garbage and hackers floating around anymore, I would rather be safe than sorry.  Anymore, any time a person signs on to the Internet, or fires up their cell phone, they face the very real possibility of anything they do or say falling into the wrong hands.



...I avoid Google and IE as much as possible!!! I use Bing as my search engine and FireFox as my browser..


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## Ken N Tx (Jun 8, 2015)

LynnD said:


> That amazes me about Facebook but that's good! What I find strange is my daughter will text or email me a pic of a dress she bought from a certain store....then later I see that same dress in my feed on Facebook ...I do "follow" that store but I find it eerie that it's always the same dress she emailed me.



If you search Amazon or Ebay for anything, it will appear on your FB page even if you do not log into Amazon or Ebay!!

Facebook also has a face recognition feature. I posted an early photo of me and the wife from when we were teenagers and it automatically tagged us!!


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## AprilT (Jun 8, 2015)

I do use Chrome Google, but, I've got tweaked a few things here and there and manage to block out certain things if I really don't want them to follow me on some sites, but, yes, google is massively intrusive, but, I still prefer them to some other engines. I avoid IE like the plague.  ABP and ghosting work great for me so far, I could tweak things more if I really wanted to avoid even more of a trail, but it does take work and you'll never be trailless completely, not that it really matters all that much to me, as long as they leave me alone with the ads and popups I'm ok.  I don't have to see any ads on youtube when I visit that site and that's a big plus.

I think with FB, you have to set your privacy setting and not give out certain permissions to avoid having something show up on your page, Amazon, nor Ebay show up on my page and I search those sites quite a bit.  Come to think of it, not much shows up on my FB page these days, I've just about unfollowed everyone I know, I really didn't want to hear about everyone's daily grooming, eating, dating, recipe cute, corny joke, join invites.  :holymoly:So now I mostly go there and stare at a blank page, guess sometimes you have to be careful what you ask for.  But, so far, it's all good, just click on a friend or family member if I really care to know an update.  LOL!


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## LynnD (Jun 8, 2015)

Ken N Tx said:


> If you search Amazon or Ebay for anything, it will appear on your FB page even if you do not log into Amazon or Ebay!!
> 
> Facebook also has a face recognition feature. I posted an early photo of me and the wife from when we were teenagers and it automatically tagged us!!



Double YIKES!   Actually I'm not a person that is usually to fearful as I don't have much to hide but now I'm wondering.


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## Ken N Tx (Jun 9, 2015)

AprilT said:


> I do use Chrome Google, but, I've got tweaked a few things here and there and manage to block out certain things if I really don't want them to follow me on some sites, but, yes, google is massively intrusive, but, I still prefer them to some other engines. I avoid IE like the plague.  ABP and ghosting work great for me so far, I could tweak things more if I really wanted to avoid even more of a trail, but it does take work and you'll never be trailless completely, not that it really matters all that much to me, as long as they leave me alone with the ads and popups I'm ok.  I don't have to see any ads on youtube when I visit that site and that's a big plus.
> 
> I think with FB, you have to set your privacy setting and not give out certain permissions to avoid having something show up on your page, Amazon, nor Ebay show up on my page and I search those sites quite a bit.  Come to think of it, not much shows up on my FB page these days, I've just about unfollowed everyone I know, I really didn't want to hear about everyone's daily grooming, eating, dating, recipe cute, corny joke, join invites.  :holymoly:So now I mostly go there and stare at a blank page, guess sometimes you have to be careful what you ask for.  But, so far, it's all good, just click on a friend or family member if I really care to know an update.  LOL!



Since I have added ABP I do not see the Amazon/Ebay ads..


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## AprilT (Jun 9, 2015)

Ken N Tx said:


> Since I have added ABP I do not see the Amazon/Ebay ads..View attachment 18487



  Yeppers, I love it, even more for use with youtube, I never have those ads appear prior or in between viewing videos.


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## Son_of_Perdition (Jun 9, 2015)

When I was exclusively using Windows I still had my paranoia and as a result I downloaded and installed memory/HD/history/cookies cleaners I switched to Linux (personal favorite OS), I found that most if not all of the cleaners were Windows based or written especially for that OS.  Linux was mostly trial and error as I learned.  Sometime during my learning curve I discovered that there was a cleaner for Linux, *BLEACHBIT*  I download and installed it and have used it ever since.  It is somewhat Spartan but does the job.  It is runs on either Linux or Windows and is* FREE*.  It is the last thing I run when I shut my computer down for the night.  Yes, I shut it off every night along with my router.  Reboots and resets the units there are 2 schools of thought on both ways.  I did the same thing at work and never had issues, it gave me control over updates.  Worked for me.  Here is a review of Bleachbit that explains it as well as any.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2030...ive-disk-cleaning-and-privacy-protection.html


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## Son_of_Perdition (Jun 9, 2015)

48 hour update, since using Ghostery & blocking everything that shows up on my hit list, I have noticed a few things, First when logging into my SS account the output was a plain text format.   I was able to link to areas I normally do but it was less graphical, solution I now open that site in another browser.  Second I noticed that most comment sections of sites are blank and/or I get notices that Ghostery has blocked the comments.  That tells me that they are tracking comments, whether that's good or bad can't tell.  It would show trends or something that would mean more to a researcher than it would to me.  Solution kept them blocked since I usually never read them as most are either trolling or bullying the writer & I never put much stock in a generic comment, after all it's just an opinion.  Third & last I did notice that after blocking all I had a few glitches bringing up my data on my financial accounts, I had to pause blocking on some to get a better picture of my bank account.  The ones that were restored were flagged as security sites.  

I never had to restore a advertiser, beacon or analytical.


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## Jonathan Mathews (Sep 17, 2015)

For those who don't know, all your activity on the Internet is gathered through a combination of pixel tags and cookies and then is used to create a specific profile with all the information about your gender, likes and dislikes and even fears. Millions of people worldwide use ad blockers, and I recommend for those who don't have it - not to hesitate, and download it as fast as possible in order to protect your privacy and sanity. There are more advantages of ad blockers than you might think. It will not only prevent you from seeing annoying ads, but also save you hundreds of megabytes of traffic a month, in other words it will increase the speed of web browsing. Furthermore, ad blocker will prevent you from getting malware. (Didn't you know you can get one from ads?)


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