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QUESTION Wow, I decided to read one of the "We collect cookies" popups that come up at the bottom of the screen at the bottom of some webpages...

I was curious how much it would cost to build a cheap, but good PC. I've never done it before but, what the hemp, My computer badly needs to be upgraded By that I mean I need a new computer, so lets see what it costs. On the bottom of the screen, I see a familiar black bar that says that it collects cookies. It had a small link to the Cookies policy and a big "Got It" button. I decided to read.

Just, wow. Those websites are getting a LOT of information on us. All you have to do is continue using the site as confirmation that you agree. I had never really thought about it. They have an undisclosed "third party" that they give our demographic data too.

Demographic Data-
Socioeconomic characteristics of a population expressed statistically, such as age, sex, education level, income level, marital status, occupation, religion, birth rate, death rate, average size of a family, average age at marriage.

Maybe I'm slowly turning into a "conspiracy theorist" (Yes, I realize the quotes don't help.) It makes me wonder. Who is this "third party" and why do they want to process our demographic data?

Its effectively tracking your thoughts and location, profiling you, storing your information and giving it a unnamed people. Do I have reason to worry that people are tracking that much info on us?

BabyBlues420 5 Nov 27
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6 comments

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Used to build computers, then it got cheaper to buy. Went from windows to linux and now enjoy chrome desk - get at least 2ram.

mzee Level 7 Dec 1, 2017
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Yes you should be very worried. Political actors such as the Russian FSB and Israel's MOSSAD are collating data on us all in order to target specific voters and to build consensus for their own agenda amongst American and European citizens.

They are doing this using social media posts as well as your search history and purchases via Amazon etc.
Anyone who uses facefook will tell you that targeted advertising can be a good thing; for example , the software learns that I never click on dating adverts or plastic surgery ads and they have stopped showing me those, so that's a good thing for both me and the advertiser.
Where it's gone too far now is that political groups with billionaire backers , such as the Israeli lobby or even the extremist religious community in the US, or Putin, can build social media groups which are then targeted with extremist messaging.
The anti Clinton propaganda pushed out by Putin and his American billionaire parasites was a case in point. The reason why it had such a devastating impact is because Cambridge Analytica had already built these social media groups using people's likes and dislikes and so other people , like myself, who are devoted to the facts , were shut out of such groups and so the people in them never heard any modifying voice.

This was extremely effective in those swing states where Trump barely scraped through and the rest of us did not even know what these idiots were seeing because it was for their eyes only. Someone like myself would have been weeded out way beforehand due to my having liked an Oxfam post or something similar.

It's dangerous because political advertising campaigns in the past were highly visible, meaning that the entire world could call bs on blatant lies , whereas now Trump and Bannon have their own email subscription list and they are continuously bombarding these people with misinformation and requests for money and the rest of us are totally unaware.
That's why ordinary folk are shocked at some of the conspiracy theories going down but they fail to realise that these fake narratives have been built over time.
It's very worrying.
We all have to become much more discriminating about where our news is coming from and always be critical and check with other sources.

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Ok, I am see a lot of people in the I Don't Care side of things, but I'm not so worried that people know about me. It's more about, someone having that power over people. That kind of information could be used to profile you by your beliefs, religiously or politically.

Imagine for a minute, that Hitler had that kind of profiling technology and mass intelligence on almost any person on the planet. We would most likely all be under Nazi rule right now and entire demographics would be wiped off the face of the earth. and might I remind you, Hitler was a man of god. Not unlike some politicians you see today,

Let that sink in for a moment.

Hitler was definitely not a 'man of God '.
From Wikipedia:
Adolf Hitler's religious beliefs have been a matter of debate; the wide consensus of historians consider him to have been irreligious and anti-Christian. In light of evidence such as his vocal rejection of the tenets of Christianity,[1] numerous private statements to confidants denouncing Christianity as a harmful superstition, and his strenuous efforts to reduce the influence and independence of Christianity in Germany after he came to power, Hitler's major academic biographers conclude that he was irreligious and an opponent of Christianity. Historian Laurence Rees found no evidence that "Hitler, in his personal life, ever expressed belief in the basic tenets of the Christian church".[2] Hitler's remarks to confidants, as described in the Goebbels Diaries, the memoirs of Albert Speer, and transcripts of Hitler's private conversations recorded by Martin Bormann in Hitler's Table Talk, are further evidence of his irreligious and anti-Christian beliefs; these sources record a number of private remarks in which Hitler ridicules Christian doctrine as absurd, contrary to scientific advancement, and socially destructive.[3]

Hitler, attempting to appeal to the German masses during his political campaign and leadership, sometimes made declarations in support of religion and against atheism. He stated in a speech that atheism (a concept he linked with Communism and "Jewish materialism" ) had been "stamped out",[4] and banned the German Freethinkers League in 1933.["

And further:

"
Hitler's early policy speeches showed "a sincere appreciation of Christianity as a value system to be upheld",[12] and he personally believed in an active God, which he expressed as "Providence".[13], although historian Percy Ernst Schramm, analyzing the recorded and transcribed table talk with his entourage states that "For Jesus as a Savior there was, of course, no room in Hitler's view of things, but he recognized Jesus' human greatness."[13] Indeed, Hitler held Jesus in high esteem as an "Aryan fighter" who struggled against "the power and pretensions of the corrupt Pharisees"[13] and Jewish materialism.[14] While a small number of writers accept his publicly stated views as genuine expressions of his spirituality,[12] the vast majority believe that Hitler was skeptical of churches generally – although he "freely acknowledged the religious needs of the masses"[13] – but recognized that he could only be elected and preserve his political power if he feigned a commitment to and belief in Christianity, which the overwhelming majority of Germans believed in.[15] Hitler himself told confidants that his reluctance to make public attacks on the Church was not a matter of principle, but a pragmatic political move.[16] In his private diaries, Goebbels wrote in April 1941 that though Hitler was "a fierce opponent" of the Vatican and Christianity, "he forbids me to leave the church. For tactical reasons."[17]

Once in office, Hitler and his regime sought to reduce the influence of Christianity on society.[18] From the mid-1930s, his government was increasingly dominated by militant anti-Christians like Goebbels, Bormann, Himmler, Rosenberg and Heydrich whom Hitler appointed to key posts.[19] These anti-church radicals were generally permitted or encouraged to perpetrate the Nazi persecutions of the churches.[20] "

The confusion comes in because Hitler , like Marx before him and the GOP today, recognised early on how simple minded religionists are and he merely tolerated the church and used it when he could for his own political agenda.
The national socialists hated communists and Jews above all and Germany and Austria were very old fashioned Catholic countries at the time. This led the church to criticise communism and atheism as non German and he was certainly not above using the anti Semitism and anti democratic church doctrine of that era as an early propaganda tool.
Once he was in power though he crushed the authority of the church as much as he could and persecuted church men who spoke out against his ethnic cleansing policies.

I think you guys aremissing the point

They wouldn't have missed the point if you hadn't thrown a large distracting wrench into the proper functioning of your own argument. Your case could have been made quite readily without the nonsense about Hitler being a man of God. I followed and agreed with you fine until that point, but @OutlawJosie is utterly correct, and I thank her for her thoroughness. We atheists have enough to blame Christians for already without also falsely laying Hitler at their door.

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You can follow these steps to help safeguard your data.

[eff.org]

I also recommend getting a VPN. The Opera browser is free and has a built in VPN that works pretty well, but it interferes with sites like Netflix if the VPN is turned on.

d_day Level 7 Nov 27, 2017
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I understand fully that anything I put online has left my protection. Period.

Absolutely correct.

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Just FYI, we don't track cookies other than used for login/etc. We don't have 3rd party ads on our site but we do have a cookie set when a visitor comes from places we advertise on (such as Facebook) so we can see if they join or not. Frankly, we don't have time to do sinister things.

Admin Level 9 Nov 27, 2017

Unfortunately that won't stop someone else nefarious attempting to use your platform to do nefarious things!!
The truth is that we are all already identified as a certain type of person just by being a member. That's not your fault, it's just the way it is these days.

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