While quizzing my Dear Wife about what, exactly, he was getting for her points (yet another restaurant is offering random points for purchases) , i remarked that, thanks to the wonders of data mining, tying your info to other stores data is pretty easy. Granted, if there was actual value for tendering over your buying habits, i have no problem providing a set of information for them. Whether or not that information relates to me depends on the value of what i'm getting back.
My wife knows that and commented, "Next time, i'm going to call myself Jane Smith." i offered that she should call herself "Jennifer Lee" instead. Why? Well, it helps to know the population of a given area. The best way to hide is to be in the largest possible crowd.
Turns out, that's actually even more true now than before. What makes you distinct is what's different about you. If you reduce the amount of perceived uniqueness about yourself to the smallest possible value, you fall into the data mining noise. What's hard, however, is trying not to be unique. Since the big tip-off there is the number of plug-ins you may have installed. i'll note that i have:
- Google Earth
- Google Talk
- Google Update
- Java Deployment Toolkit (*This is disabled in my browser, but still detectable)
- Java Platform SE 6 (*likewise)
- NVidia 3D Vision
- Picasa
- Quicktime
- Shockwave
- Silverlight
- iTunes
None of those are particularly "unique", but the combination of installed versions (presumably, the fact that i keep things up-to-date) all contribute to a fairly unique signature.
i'm still mulling about how to ninja the plugin information so that it's harder to detect uniqueness, but i'm not really sure how to do that without blocking version number detection from the scripts and that's not something that i can easily control. i wish plug-in vendors didn't publish that info so readily, but not much i can do about that. i'm not really sure how to best solve the problem, which is fine by me.
Because it means i get to try and figure out how to do it.
