Persona

Shortcuts: Check your persona Right now . Understand what webmasters know about You.
Other related pages: Connection persona , email persona , persona tips , Cookies , anonymizers..

Persona Testers- These websites give you real-time feedback about your persona.  The first link in each row takes you directly to the persona testing web page.  The second link (via google) takes you to a google search, which should then lead you to the persona testing page.

Consider the Following Diagram:

A researcher is online and surfing the Internet.  This computer  has a persona of:

The researcher is looking at a webpage (URL1) and clicks on a link which leads to another webpage (URL2).  With that simple click, this is some of the  information that is now available to the webmaster of  URL2:
  1. Remote Host: This is the Persona of your machine or the gateway your requests pass through.  The web server MUST have this information in order to send the requested web page to you.
  2. http Referrer:  This is the address of the  web page you were previously viewing (URL1)  My Check your person now page talks about why this can cause a problem for you.
Another concern...
A researcher is online and surfing the Internet. The researcher enters some "search terms" into a search_tool.  The researcher then visits the sites listed in the search tool's "hits".   Look at the following diagram to see what has just happened:


Thick Red Lines:  The Webmaster at searchtool.com knows your “search terms” and persona.  For any search tool that you use, what do you know about the organization (and webmaster) who runs that specific search tool?

Double Blue Lines: There is now a very good chance that the webmaster of target.com also knows what search terms you have used to reach them.  How is this possible? Searchtool.com displays your "top ten hits" on a search results page which may have a URL such as:

By looking at the referring URL, the webmaster of target.com can now know exactly which search terms you used to discover his site.  In fact, the URL of the search results page often contains all the additional parameters you used to construct your search query.  A webmaster can view the exact same search results page as you, to see what other pages were suggested to you, based on your search query.

Here are some example referral URL's taken from my own website statistics.  Click on them to see the search results that visitors used to find my site:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=isp+backbone+maps  ,
http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=russ+haynal ,

Some referral URL's are simply links from public web pages:

http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/Maps/Network_Topology/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_backbone

You must also be careful on how you name the web pages in your Intranet.  Here are examples of intranet pages that link towards my site:

  1. http://doc.uunet.ca:2001/tutorial/ispinfo.html (you can tell why they link to me)
  2. http://www.oen.siemens.de/projects2/p203/pub/links.html (notice the "non-revealing" URL)
  3. http://insidefs.mcln.federal.unisys.com/misc/links/main.htm .
A Manual way to suppress http_referrer...
Is there a way to avoid passing the referrer information along when selecting a web page link?    YES -  Here are some relatively convenient methods:
  1. Right-click on the link and select "copy link location"   This will place the Link's URL into the clipboard. Now you can paste the URL  into the browser's location area, and hit the Enter key on the keyboard. 
  2. Right-click on the link and select "add bookmark"   Now you can select the link from the bookmark listing.
  3. I've also noticed that a referring URL does not seem to be passed along when the referring web page is based on your computer. You may want to take the web page, and "save as" to your hard disk.  In the process, you can also rename the page to something generic like: "page.html"  This should succeed in hiding the Referring URL, or at least give it a less obvious address like:   file:///C|/temp/page.htm
  4. Important Note: These three previous tips work ONLY if the URL is "direct" to the web site.  Be on the lookout for URLs that are "forwarding URLs".  In other words, the hyperlink takes you back to the search tool, and then forwards you to the real destination.

To Automatically suppress http_referrer...

  1. Your local firewall may offer this option. Norton security Suite is supposed to offer this feature, as does Zone Alarm Pro (from Zonelabs)  Directions for Zone Alarm Pro: Open up Zone Alarm --> Click on "privacy" in the left column --> Click on the "Main" tab along the top -->  In the "cookies" section click on "custom" --> in the "3rd Party cookies" section check box "Remove Private Header Information"
  2. In Firefox, you can alter your browser using the following steps:
    - in the browser's address bar, type:  about:config
    - Scroll down to the line called: network.http.sendRefererHeader
    - Right-click on the line and select "modify"
    - Change the "2" to a "0" (zero) and then click OK.

A note about Google's Cached search links....

Some researchers incorrectly assume that clicking on Google's "cached" in a search result will only make hits to Google, and make no hits to the search target's website. Truth is, clicking on "cached" will almost always result in unusual hits to the the target web server. Consider the following sequence of events.

  1. You click on Google's cached link for a search result
  2. The Text of that web page downloads from Google's cache to your computer.
  3. Your computer displays the text of that cached web page in your browser.
  4. The text web page (now in your browser) will now begin to download any embedded multimedia on that page (embedded graphics, animations, flash plug-ins, sound, video etc)
  5. Such embedded multimedia, is downloaded directly from the target website to your browser.  Google only caches the text of the page, any graphics, sounds, etc. are downloaded by you from the target website.
  6. The Target webserver now has hits from your persona asking for just the multi-media of a web page, but has no hits  from you for the text of the page itself.  The webmaster now knows that you are viewing the text of the web page from some other resource (such as.Google's cache or a language translation site)
  7. If your browser leaks http_referrer, then the downloaded graphics will leak a referrer along the lines of::
     google_cache_/_URL_of web_page_from_cache_/_Your_search_terms_used_to_find_page

Google does offer a "Cached text only" version of the web page, but normally you can't get to the text-only cached page until you first view the regular version of google's cached page (which by then will have downloaded the embedded multimedia from the target site).  Here is the work around:

  1. In the Google search result, Right-click on the cached link. 
  2. Select "copy shortcut"  or "copy link location" depending on your type of browser. (This copied hyperlink is for the regular cached copy of the web page which will include multimedia)
  3. click into the web browser's address box and paste-in the cached URL you just copied
  4. Now You need to EDIT the URL by adding the following text onto the end of the URL:  &strip=1
  5. Now hit enter on the Keyboard, and that should take you directly to the "text only" version of Google's cached copy of the web page.  This means that the target website will not see any hits  from your research.  However Google will still know that you are viewing the cached copy of the web page.

This cutting/pasting/&strip=1 technique will only only work IF google is not "hijacking" its own search results.  Google has this annoying tendency of running a javascript on their search page as you click on a search result or cached link in the search results.  This javascript re-designs the hyperlinks to lead back to Google so google can log what search links you are clicking on.  If the &strip=1 technique is not working, you need to disable javascript in your browser.  In a work environment ask tech support for help.

A note about Google's "Instant Preview" (and where is "cached")

You may have noticed that google search results no longer display a "cached" option directly in Google's search results.  This change  happened as Google implemented a new feature called "instant preview".  In your google search results, hover your mouse over a search hit that you are interested in.  While hovering over the hit... A pair of  >> arrows should appear just to the right of the hit.  Now hover your mouse over the >>, and a small screen shot of the web page should appear.  I can confirm that this "instant preview" is causing live hits on the target website from Google, as Google goes out in real time to grab the web page text and all the graphics  from the target website.  Repeat.. Displaying the "instant preview" of a search hit causes live hits to the target web server from Google.  The Target web master will know that his web page is bring viewed in a google search.  Google also decided that the "cached" link should now be displayed in the "instant preview" window pane.  There are many researchers who are angry with google about this as shown on this thread.

So right now you can no longer get to google's  cached link to copy/paste/&strip=1 without invoking the "instant preview" pane (which will cause live hits to the target web server)  Options include:

 

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