Sagitta Cantina

Well, this morning I opened an email from ebay. Before I opened it, I thought it was the typical junk mail that you get from a lot of these sites. This one was a bit more thought provoking, not for the item (although I am still undecided about whether I want an Oracle), but on what the text meant.
First off, I am not a habitual denizen of ebay. I typically go there once a month or so, and have been the winner of a whole two auctions since its inception. I was not surprised when I would get emails telling me I have been out bid or that something I had marked for watching was no longer available. This however was different. All I did was visit the page for the Oracle after a search.

If ebay's metrics are keeping that much of a tab on us, is anything private?

No...

Later! OL J R

Perhaps you should clear your cache more often. I'm reminded of one of my favorite old flying saucer movies called "The Thing From Another World" It was about a crashed flying saucer and the Martian attacking a polar base. The monster was a very young... James Arnes!

In one part a very frightened man asked a group of soldiers; "What if it can read our minds?" One guy responds, "He's really going to be mad when he gets to me."

They don't need to spy on me, just ask. I'll tell them a lot more than they want to hear.

They wouldn't have to use my cache, just track where I went on their site, I hope. When the cookie gets written to my computer, they could just have a copy for their own use. So clearing the cache frequently while still a good idea, wouldn't necessarily solve the incursion.

The additional problem with sites doing this as far as I'm concerned, is that the government has flexed it muscle before to get private information from companies.

Bernie,

I'd only worry about emails like the one you got from eBay, when they get to the point of having WAY too much information ... like informing you that a drone deployed a droid to look in your basement window, notices that your rocket bench is a little empty, and therefore, you ought to really consider that Oracle to get your rocketry juices flowing again ...