I was searching for someone's Amazon wishlist and found this link, instead: Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists. It's nearly 5 years old, so you probably discovered this long before I did, but it's pretty interesting how much data he could find just linking together a few public, free databases.
It reminded me of an ad I saw on a website yesterday. (I should have captured it.) It said something like "Searching for Gary Gnu?" and then provided links to a couple of sites ostensibly selling Gary Gnu (Buy Gary Gnu on eBay.ca!). I had done a Google search for Gary Gnu a few days before; the ad must have been sniffing my browser history to figure that out, possibly using the old link coloring trick.
Is privacy dead? Probably, but I think it has been for a long time now. The only real difference is that we know it, and I guess that's half the battle.
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