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[Roadtrip]

Not just your browser, but everything. Location (easy, from your IP address), content of your posts, everything they can correlate about your demographics from the above-referenced data mining. That's why Facebook and Google are worth so much money.

Your IP is always going to be viable to the server your hitting when requesting a web page (they need to know where to return the request) and yes, a simple report can show that to the server owners, so it's really easy to see where your viewers are. If you enter your private information in the browser settings, yes, that info can be crawled by the server and captured.

NEVER put your information into the browser properties.

ALWAYS assume that anything you put out on the internet is just as good as placing an avert in the local paper.

As to why Google is worth so much money, they developed a very simple (easy to use) tool, with a powerful back-end that indexed and crawled the internet so that finding information was more intuitive. People flocked to the site and Google started to monetize it... ever do a web search for "Car Loan" and all of a sudden your seeing tons of ads for Car Ins, Lending Tree, eLoan, etc? That's how Google makes it's money, by charging a higher rate for ads because they can target you and the advertiser knows his ad is being see by a more interested demographic.

Think of a billboard and if you had the ability to know the demographics of the person walking by who would read that billboard. If you knew how they voted in the last election, how many kids, relationship status, what hobbies or special interests they might have. If you knew they were an avid biker, the LBS would likely pay a premium to get his advertisement seen by that demographic group, right?

Same thing goes on on a broader level all the time. Ever notice how those Lottery Jackpot billboards always are placed in poorer neighborhoods and the luxury car billboards are conveniently located near the mall or affluent communities?

Facebook is just evil and looks the other way while advertisers scrape the data of you and ALL your friends any time play a game or interact with a part of the site. Not all advertisers do this, but Zynga is the biggest and has made millions (and likely paid Facebook a good chunk too), while they collect data on you and your friends every move. Oh and yea, if one of your FB friends inadvertently opens up the private data cookie jar, because your linked as friends, your private information is out in the wild now too.

Shannon