Why do all site want you to connect them to other sites?

iamstop

I'm grand with the google, gmail, google news, picasa etc, all one parent company, though I've not joined my youtube acc. My prob is when site want me to connect with flickr, twitter, hotmail, yahoo, facebook and each other.
Like, WTF? :eek:
What is wrong with just having a hotmail account for hotmail business, flickr for flickr and so on?
Is there something more going on here? It's easier to keep track of someone if you lump all their online activities together rather then if they have 20 seperate accounts for all their different online dealings.

What you think?

kirving

Well, flickr is better for photo's than twitter(plixi) is, but I might want to show all my twitter followers a pic of mine on flickr. It makes it much easier if the sites are connected. (only an example, i'm not sure if you can actually do this.)

Sure, it makes it easier to track you, but your probably going to use the same email address for most of the sites anyway.

I wouldn't exactly be worried about it.

oneweb

As an example Facebook (and others) track sites even when you're not logged into a facebook-linked site, ever seen the 'share this' button? That hits Facebook every time you see it (not even clicked) so they know you've visited.

Anti Social is an addon for Firefox which blocks this
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/162098/

Linking everything together is a marketer's wet dream, they know so much about everyone, it's all worth an absolute fortune to them.

iamstop

It's not that I'm doing anything illegal or anything but there may be somethings I've posted in some circles that may be embarrassing or unacceptable in other. I'm sure we've all heard the stories of people calling in sick and them posting picture of the party they were at, boss see pics, fired.
Also the auto thralling through your address books and sending them "join 'XXYY' because 'ZZ' invited you" type emails

iamstop

oneweb wrote: »

As an example Facebook (and others) track sites even when you're not logged into a facebook-linked site, ever seen the 'share this' button? That hits Facebook every time you see it (not even clicked) so they know you've visited.

Anti Social is an addon for Firefox which blocks this
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/162098/

Linking everything together is a marketer's wet dream, they know so much about everyone, it's all worth an absolute fortune to them.

Cheers for the add-on heads up. There is another one I use with FireFox called google sharing, it basically puts your search into a cloud before sending it to google and then back to you. Like a proxy I guess.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60333/