Profiling
Modern technology is a lot more pervasive and invasive in the way it amasses personal information and compiles profiles of our identity and persona. Analysis of these profiles are then used to make certain assumptions about our private or professional lives, habits, interests and associations.
Internet Profiling
Many organizations, websites and media outlets cover the dangers and threats posed by Internet profiling. A lot of this is done by marketing companies, recording and collating IP addresses of visitors to websites to by making users download cookies, that perform a similar function. Google's advertising and market research tools DoubleClick and Adsense have installed cookies on billions of computers and are able to deliver 'relevant' advertisement to the website the user accesses.
Profiling can have a much more pervasive and negative impact – when certain assumptions are made about your political or religious orientation say, by your network's of friends on Facebook, Twitter or LiveJournal. Facebook has a concrete policy whereby it will reply to an email sent from a law enforcement domain (see above: email spoofing!) with information regarding one of its users.
Media: http://www.facebook.com/safety/groups/law/guidelines/
There are no specific guidelines to avoid online profiling. You must be extra vigilant when creating and maintaining social network profiles; You should always use SSL connections rather than http (Lesson 2)and anonymous networks should you wish to conceal your IP and your destination (see Lesson 3); You should wipe temporary Internet files after each session, this includes any collected cookies (see Lesson 4).
