Big Brother is Watching

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holmqer

Local Chapter Leader
Joined
Aug 3, 2007
Messages
1,662
Location
CT, USA.
Before lunch, I went to the Fastenal website looking for tap extractors, found none and went to lunch.

Came back from lunch and I had email ads from Fastenal in my inbox.

Did not log in or give them my email address

As far as I can guess, they nibbled on my cookies to figure out my email and used it to send me an ad
 
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Does that bother you??

Do you WANT further information that may help you??
Or is there a "creepy" factor because you were "trackable"?

I'm truly interested, since there is software that would allow us to help you shop in most cases, but we are afraid we would "creep you out".
 
Last edited:
ed4copies said:
Does that bother you??

Do you WANT further information that may help you??
Or is there a "creepy" factor because you were "trackable"?

I'm truly interested, since there is software that would allow us to help you shop in most cases, but we are afraid we would "creep you out".
Click to expand...

The creep factor was too high for me
 
alphageek said:
Have you logged in to their site in the past? If so it can be VERY easy to know that its you... if they mapped your IP address to you.

A couple of links:
a) What your browser shares
http://www.showmyipaddress.eu/
b) some reading about privacy
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/psm/help_21/privacy_help.html
Click to expand...

It's a brand new computer that has never been to that site before. I had logged in before but never from that IP address. My company uses dynamic IP and I never get the same IP from one day to the next.
 
If you walk into a shop to browse the wares, you don't have to give them your name and address so why shouldn't internet sites be the same?

There are many sites ( IAP vendors too ) that I would like to buy stuff from, but because they require me to open an account or register or some other crap, then I just take my money somewhere else. :wink:
 
skiprat said:
If you walk into a shop to browse the wares, you don't have to give them your name and address so why shouldn't internet sites be the same?

There are many sites ( IAP vendors too ) that I would like to buy stuff from, but because they require me to open an account or register or some other crap, then I just take my money somewhere else. :wink:
Click to expand...
I agree, I don't want to register just so I can look around. The only time I will register is if I truly trust the site to keep my info to themselves.
 
skiprat said:
If you walk into a shop to browse the wares, you don't have to give them your name and address so why shouldn't internet sites be the same?

There are many sites ( IAP vendors too ) that I would like to buy stuff from, but because they require me to open an account or register or some other crap, then I just take my money somewhere else. :wink:
Click to expand...

Steven, you certainly can hand your pounds over to the cute young thing behind the check out. But unless you want me to ship to a "skip somewhere in Wales" I need your address!! :rolleyes:

Of course you could hop on a plane to do a bit of browsing here... No name or addy required, just a sexy accent! :biggrin:
 
holmqer said:
It's a brand new computer that has never been to that site before. I had logged in before but never from that IP address. My company uses dynamic IP and I never get the same IP from one day to the next.
Click to expand...

Brand new computer or not... The IP address that you get from your company is 99% likelyhood of being an 'internal' address. No matter which PC you log in from, the address that your company is showing out is mapped to the same external address.

However, it is definately scary! I'm not convinced there isn't something 'wonky' going on here.:beat-up:
 
If you did'nt log on and you have never gone to that sight from that machine b4 then I would chalk it up to coincidence. While it can be done if you logged onto your e-mail from that machine that kind of spy-ware is not friendly and in my book malicious.
 
PR_Princess said:
Steven, you certainly can hand your pounds over to the cute young thing behind the check out. But unless you want me to ship to a "skip somewhere in Wales" I need your address!! :rolleyes:

Of course you could hop on a plane to do a bit of browsing here... No name or addy required, just a sexy accent! :biggrin:
Click to expand...


Sure Dawn, but you don't need my address UNTIL I decide to buy something. I'm a grown boy now and if I 'drop my basket' I'll just start again, I don't need an 'assist'.


Besides, you already have my address etched in that pretty little head of yours for when you dump that salesman:biggrin:
 
alphageek said:
Brand new computer or not... The IP address that you get from your company is 99% likelyhood of being an 'internal' address. No matter which PC you log in from, the address that your company is showing out is mapped to the same external address.

However, it is definately scary! I'm not convinced there isn't something 'wonky' going on here.:beat-up:
Click to expand...

Even if mapped to the same company IP address, we have 15,000 employees! how did they get me in particular with dynamic IP? The IT department set it up that way to keep external sites from tracking us
 
holmqer said:
Even if mapped to the same company IP address, we have 15,000 employees! how did they get me in particular with dynamic IP? The IT department set it up that way to keep external sites from tracking us
Click to expand...


Recall a couple days ago. We found (through Lou's diligent research) that one company had 78 websites. You don't suppose that if you register with ONE, they SHARE that information, do you??

Just another theory.
 
I'm sure there is something more going on here . Cookies don't hold your personal information unless you put it there and one company can't read anothers cookies without first installing some sort of software first which would be picked up by either your AV software or windows itself if your security settings are set properly .
The information held in your IP address is limited to just the basics of your OS and web provider .
 
If you don't want any of this stuff, set your browser to ask before accepting any cookies. There are stores that share cookies so if you register at one store, then pop into another just to look around they know you're the same person.

I block 99% of the cookies that come my way. I'm much happier because of it.
 
It is all coincidence. I doubt they have the resources to pull something that slick off for some extractor sales. Internet protection is easy. The problem is knowing what to do. Unfortunately they will let anyone on the internet without training or real computer knowledge. This is what makes it so easy to steal information.

You need to educate yourself and not worry about thread chatter on big brother hipe.

And let's face it, your information is no longer personal. It's out there and if someone really wants it, you can do nothing about it. Sign up for lifelock and do a lot of praying.

One last word of advice: TURN OFF YOUR COOKIES!!!
 
If I purchase from a site regularly, I will set up an account to make purchasing easier and MAY elect to get email ads or specials. Other than that, I dont want a bunch of unsolicited emails clogging up my inbox.
 
Eric,
I can see a company whose website you visited gleening your IP address and as stated above, a few other bits of information such as your operating system or version of browser but I have never heard of anyone learning your email address simply by obtaining your IP address. The only way I can see this working is for them to actually plant spyware on your pc which is of course illegal and your firewall security should have caught that.

I too believe the emails were a coincidence. I have visited Fastenal many times in the past, never logged in or gave any information and have never received any email from them so wouldn't suspect them of running spyware of any kind.
 
holmqer said:
Even if mapped to the same company IP address, we have 15,000 employees! how did they get me in particular with dynamic IP? The IT department set it up that way to keep external sites from tracking us
Click to expand...


IT networking person here. Every IP address has 64,000 port numbers associated with it. (Just over 2000 of those are reserved.) When you go out to the public net from your corporate network you are about 98% likely to be going through a network address translation device which maps your company's many internal IP addresses to one (or a few) external IP addresses. This is done by mapping user-A's internal IP address to an external IP-address/port-5000 and mapping user-b's to IP-address/port-5001, and user-c's to IP-address/port-5002, etc. What this means is that it is very very likely that you will always have the same IP address when you go out to the internet from your company. So if you have a website that maps known users and their IP addresses, it won't matter that you change internal addresses/machines, you will always be the same on the outside.

If you want to see what your external IP address is you can go to http://whatsmyip.com/ and it will tell you. Then you can take that info and plug it into http://networking.ringofsaturn.com/Tools/dig.php preceded by a "-x " and that will tell you who actually owns that IP address by looking at the info right after the PTR in the Answer Section.

For instance, my internal IP is 10.0.100.3. Whatsmyip.com tells me that my external IP is 24.4.18.109. dig -x 24.4.18.109 tells me that my IP is associated with the name
;; ANSWER SECTION:
109.18.4.24.in-addr.arpa. 7200 IN PTR c-24-4-18-109.hsd1.ca.comcast.net.
The majority of companies will have only one external IP address. If you have your own website and mail server and ftp server, etc that you manage at your office location then you may have a few more, but not likely. Those can just be mapped to the one IP address too.
 
Chuck Key said:
I am a Fastenal customer and received an email from them today. I did not read it but it was something about them having good deals on their fleet vehicles.

Is that the email in question?

Chuckie
Click to expand...

Yes it was the fleet vehicle email
 
You haven't met Big Brother until you drive a Semi Truck for a living. The government tracks and logs me into a file every 5 minutes or less on average. When a trucking company is audited, they go through the driver logs. The driver log might say well I was at Joe's pet shop in Dayton at 1:15pm for 15 minutes. There is a camera at the intersection of the off ramp from the highway, another down the street, then the next light, etc etc. Those camera's log my liscence plate. If I say I'm at Joes, but they have a snapshot of my plate that says I was 10 miles down the road in motion, then I'm in violation. I can fudge my daily logs all day long and a DOT officer can pull me over and he won't be sure one way or the other, but if I have an accident, then the DOT investigators will track me back 6 months or more. If 6 months ago I was anywhere that I didn't say I was, then their personal theory is that I would not be where I am right now and if I was not where I am right now the accident would not have happened and so it is my fault that the person hit me. This is why I support automated logging for all commercial vehicles. It is to benefit and cover the drivers butt. The way paper logs are set up, you can be telling the truth all the time and still look like a lyer. This year was the first year of enactment for all new trucking companies to receive automatic audits. All new companies are audited within 6 months of business, and just in that amount of time they have a truckload of documents from cameras to compare with yours. Unless a trucking company already exists, it is now almost impossible to start a new one.
 
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