While Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg faces complaints that the sites' open-graph technology--which links users to information across the Web--breaches the privacy of users, it appears Facebook is not the only company using such software. The Wall Street Journal began a series called "What They Know", which features articles and documents that focus on educating readers about Internet-tracking technology.
I stumbled upon an interactive article that lists the top visited internet sites and gives each site an "exposure index". This index is based on the degree of monitoring that each site exposes visitors to, based on tracking technology that each site employs. Sites featured in the article include: wikipedia.org, amazon.com, youtube.com, & craigslist.org, to name a few. While some sites respected the privacy of users (like wikipedia.org), others like dictionary.com had extremely high exposure index scores based on the type of information they expunged from site visitors.
In a world where the line between public and private information continues to be blurred, internet users need to be aware of what information they are giving up when they visit popular internet sites. Check out the interactive article and see how much dictionary.com already knows about you!
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