For those unacquainted, Pipl is a people search engine leveraging the “deep web” to find information on a contact you search for. They use many sources, going deeper than your run of the mill search on one of the big search engines. Whether you are searching for information on a business contact, family or friends, it is a powerful search tool. Some call it creepy, others highly useful. Its popularity is proven as Lifehacker readers rated it the top people search engine.
Pipl recently released a beta version called Pipl Contacts Search which allows you to search your entire address book and use an address book style interface to see deeper information than you may know such as the various profiles they may have across the Internet, media like images and pictures possibly associated with them, publications whether PDF file or other documents with their name in it, and also of course web pages and blog posts.
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Over at the Conversion Room Blog, Google announced a couple of ways for both end users and website owners can increase privacy of website analytic and statistic data from Google Analytics, a robust and widely popular web analytics tool to show how visitors engage with their website.
For website visitors, Google developed the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on, to opt-out of their website visits being tracked by Google Analytics.
For website owners, Google is providing on their Code site, some methods to anonymise the IP address information sent to Google for geographic reports. The website owner can now set their data collection to only send a portion of this IP address information. This may have an impact on the accuracy of geographic data reports.
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Technology•
on November 30th, 2008•
“For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,” Dr. Malone said. “In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.”
(Quote from New York Times article, You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?)
Turns out folks that online privacy may turn out to be (or is) viewed as an anomaly. Reading the NY Times article reminds me of a podcast on the topic featuring Eben Moglen speaking on “Freedom Businesses Protect Privacy” at the O’Reilly Media MySQL Conference in 2007. You can listen to the original podcast, published by IT Conversations, here. (Alternatively you can download the original podcast in MP3 format here)
