If you are not paying you are being sold

As Paul Scofield said: If you look around the (poker) table and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you. One of the common misconceptions of the Internet is that it's all free. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Two users across the country will get different search results when they type in the exact same query into the Google search engine. Who is they and how do they do it? They are ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers and web traffic analysts. Here is an excellent tool to see exactly who is watching you, what they do with your information and it provides a way to block them. I have been using it for several months and as of today have identified and blocked 186 unique sites. For those of you who want to dig a little deeper, here is another tool that goes one step further to show you how the different sites are related (specific your browsing pattern).