Wow, I will have to read this several times to really understand this.
You must be a genius, anyway, I appreciate you a lot for this very very
generous information................
I can't write as good as you can, so I will only try to understand what
you wrote, and hope I will get it.............Peter
"Vanguard" <see_signature> wrote in message
I recently went on google to look for a explanation on a medical
condition, and used a word that is not used that much. Today I get a
ton of spam with that word in the subject line, what is happening here.
Is my google search info being sold? I noticed that in AdAware there is
a section where info like the search stuff is saved, but it is
classified as not intrusive. Can someone read my computer to get the
search term I use? I run Spybot and AdAware every week. I have Zone
Alarm and a hardware firewall. I'm not paranoid, I just hate these
spammers to get to me.............Peter
Don't know about Google selling off info (other than their policy at
http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy.html where they say they share
non-personal aggregated data) but how could that be of harm to you
regarding spam E-MAIL? After all, they (Google) never got your e-mail
address. All they ever had was your IP address. You cannot be sent
e-mail based on your IP address for several reasons, like you aren't
the one running a mail server so the sender cannot connect to your IP
address to use a mail server that doesn't exist there, and your IP
address is not your IPS's e-mail address, and your IP address doesn't
divulge the alphanumeric string used to identify your e-mail account,
and probably more. Do you actually pay the extra cost of having a
*static* IP address so you can be identified by that particular
unchanging IP address? If so, somehow you divulged your e-mail address
so it can be equated with your IP address but that only works if YOU
are running the mail server that listens on THAT host with that IP
address. It is likely that you get a dynamically assigned IP address.
If you are a dial-up user, your IP address changes on every connect.
If you are a cable/DSL user, you get to keep the IP address until its
lease expires whereupon you *may* lose that IP address AFTER you
disconnect from their DHCP server, like when shutting down the OS (if
the ISP has lots of reserve in their DHCP-assigned pool of IP addresses
then you might get the same one when you boot back up). So why would
any spammer, advertiser, or anyone else try to identify your e-mail
address (if they had it) to your [potentially] ever-changing IP
address?
Unless you divulge your e-mail address, the site you connect to only
knows your IP address. It has to know your IP address so it knows
where to return the traffic that you request, like their web page
content. When you use the telephone, the other person doesn't know what
is your credit card number unless you tell them. Them knowing your
telephone number via Caller ID doesn't also divulge to them your credit
card number.
There are many ways to trick users into divulging their e-mail address.
For example, Google has you optionally specify a contact e-mail address
when you signup for a Gmail account. When you login to Gmail, it
probably leaves a cookie on your computer. After finishing with Gmail,
you then go browsing but their cookie is still around. So any links
you navigate to or any images that are web bugs can see you by your IP
address and track you by your IP address which now could be equated to
your Gmail address in the Gmail cookies. Google has your secondary
e-mail address in your Gmail account and could equate your IP address
for web bugs or navigation back to that e-mail address, too, and let
their advertisers know what it is along with your IP address so the
advertiser could then equate your IP address discovered by their web
bugs on Google pages or when you visit their sites (since you have to
divulge your IP address to get the return traffic). Is that likely?
No. Is it possible? Yes. Lots of stuff is possible but not probable.
It is possible that Bill Gates will hand over his empire to me but it's
not probable. If you are enamored with Gmail, don't specify a
secondary or contact e-mail address (but your Gmail account remains
susceptible). If you don't have a Gmail account, or you never logged
into it, then all Google knows (and any web bugs in ads on Google's
pages or for any sites you visit) is your IP address which is rarely
static for end-users and that is NOT the same as your e-mail address.
It's also possible that your own ISP might be divulging your e-mail
address by equating it to your IP address they assigned to you so
spammers using web bugs or when you visit their web pages that then get
your IP address could equate it to your e-mail address with the info
your ISP sold to them. Yeah, it's possible, but is it probable? If
it's probable, you need to find a different e-mail provider.
If you look at the headers for my newsgroup post here, my IP address as
revealed by my ISP's "NNTP-Posting-Host" inserted header (who contracts
with Giganews for NNTP service) is 66.41.236.110. Okay, so how are you
going to send me e-mail based on that? Actually that is the IP address
for my router but it wouldn't matter if I connected my computer
directly to the cable modem. Try to use that IP address to have your
mail server attempt to send me e-mail. It can't because there is no
mail server running at that e-mail address. Even if I were running an
e-mail server at that IP address and even if it used the default port
numbers, the IP *address* is not the same as the *e-mail* address used
to identify an account that is defined within the database used by that
e-mail server.
Without much of a good description, the "stuff" you're seeing in
Ad-Aware regarding "info like the search stuff" sounds like it is
alerting you to navigation info stored in the registry in MRUs (most
recently used lists). That doesn't expose you to hazards with spammers.
That exposes you to explaing your habits to your employer or parents.
Many times you'll see posts requesting how to wipe MRUs because the kid
doesn't want their parents to know that they've been hitting the porn
sites.
It is possible to retrieve information from you system using Java. For
example, although you might use a NAT router that supposedly stealths
your ports from unsolicited inbound traffic, a security test site might
reveal your computer's true IP address behind that NAT router (or
behind anything). Why? Because they downloaded and ran a Java applet
or Javascript that then runs locally on your computer to query for your
computer's IP address. For example, visit
http://www.auditmypc.com/freescan/scanoptions.asp and notice the line:
Our system detects your internal IP address as 192.168.x.x and your
external address as 66.41.236.110.
They used their Javascript to reveal your computer's actual IP address
rather than what their server got from your router as the IP address
that connected to it. But that is your numeric IP address, not your
alphanumeric e-mail address defined within some mail server's database.
Perhaps a Java applet or Javascript might go reading the content of
your cookies or other files to discover your e-mail address. Someone
familiar with Java applets and Javascript (they are NOT the same thing:
one is a program that runs in a JVM and the other is a script running
within the browser) will have to tell you how far into your system they
can invade. If you think Google is using Java or Javascript to divulge
your personal info, you could configure the Internet security zone to
prompt you for Java and scripting so you'll know on which pages Google
uses them. Be prepared to answer lots of prompts since most web sites
seem to use scripts, and prepared to lose functionality or access to a
site if you configure these to be disabled. There are Java[script]
newsgroups that could answer better how those can be used for privacy
disclosure.
--
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