No more cookies for you — a creepy invasion of privacy

I just learned about Quantcast. Basi­cally, it’s a dream for adver­tisers. Quantcast tracks web traffic. It can figure out what kind of person you are: your age, ethnicity, income range, whether or not you have kids, and your level of education. I haven’t done too much reading or inves­ti­gation about just how Quantcast can figure all of this out, but I do believe that it infers such infor­mation by exam­ining your cookies. I’m sure it’s more advanced than that, consid­ering that Quantcast’s system employs machine-learning. But anyway, I just wanted to point out that those concerned about privacy should make sure to clean up their cookies. Of course there is no personally iden­ti­fiable infor­mation collected. Quantcast can’t know what your first and last name is and what your address is. Even so, it’s a legit­imate privacy concern. I’m sure that many privacy minded folks will be aware of cleaning out their cookies, but this serves as a real reminder.

Full disclosure: I’ve installed the Quantcast plugin here. Being a narcissist (as all writers and artists are), I’m inter­ested in how this blog gets the massive amounts of traffic that it does and the type of people who visit.