So my understanding is certain info can be stored online and dug up by almost anyone, including employers.
Things they can store and give away/sell:
Your message board profiles
social network profiles
Which political groups/candidates you donate money to
Pandora playlists
Buying habits
Are they able to trace and upload the following info:
Which webpages you visit
Which vidoes you watch
the text of private emails you send
I know it is probably untrue, they probably can’t trace every web page you’ve visited, or read your emails and if anyone could I doubt they could give that info away or sell it. But who honestly knows anymore. I thought some email providers did scan the text of your emails to tailor ads to you.
I stopped donating money to political candidates because people I know IRL would google my name and find out about it, then ask me about it. If I wanted them to know I’d tell them. This all sucks.
This is a separate issue from your other questions, as candidates are required to disclose donors’ names (laws and limits vary by jurisdiction). When I owned my newspaper, I checked the campaign disclosure sites, and carefully avoided donating to anyone because it would have been interpreted as bias, even if I never reported on that particular race.
Is this only over a certain dollar amount, or for any contribution whatsoever? Is there a way around it, say, by donating instead to some group/charity which then is the one listed as the official donor?
Speaking just to this part …
Certain advertising suppliers can see all teh pages yo go to which have their ads on it. So for example doubleclick provides ads on hundreds of different websites. If you visit 30 of those sites, they know it. And which ones. And when.
But it’s unlikely they’ll share that knowledge with anyone like a prosepctive employer. What they will do is rent your next ad impression to the highest bidder. Which doesn’t involve the advertiser ever knowing it’s you by name. They just know they paid a dime to send an ad to a guy with this particular purchase & interest profile.
Other ad companies will gather similar info when you hit pages with their ads on them. But it’s also unlikely they’ll share what they know with anyone else. For super-universal ad providers like Google, they will record a much higher percentage of your total moves around the web than will some minor league ad player.
Certainly if you watch a video on an advertiser-supported site, the advertisers will know which movies you saw.
ISPs aren’t supposed to scan emails for content. Unless their terms of service tell you they will. Some do so they can provide free (i.e. advertiser-supported) email service. IIRC GMail at one time (and perhaps still now) reserves the right to read your mail for content. Supposedly to train their translators & spam hunters and such. I’m not sure I believe that’s all they’re up to.
There are ways around it, such as donating to the party, or to a PAC which endorses the candidate, or making tiny donations below the limit. Generally, though, if you donate enough to make a difference, it can be traced.
Before going into any kind of spyware or advertising cookie tracking, etc., every web site you visit has access to certain basic information. They know your IP address, they know what operating system and browser you are using, they know what pages of theirs you visit, what files you download or images you view, etc. They know what web site referred you to their site if you arrived there by clicking on a link from another site. There is quite a bit of this sort of basic information that is logged by all web servers. The site owners might or might not collect, or use some or all of that information, or share it with advertisers or other web site owners. Most reputable web sites include a privacy policy that discloses how or if they use any of that information.
Then there are tracking cookies as mentioned by LSLGuy. Web sites can store information on your computer to save preferences and settings you may have set up on their web site. For example a shopping web site might remember the last 10 items you bought by maintaining a file called a ‘cookie’ with that information saved on your computer. The next time you visit their site, they can read that cookie and know the last 10 items you bought and display similar items you might be interested in.
Many advertisers have joined forces using a system of ‘cookies’ that can be read and written to by all participants. They have a standard protocol of ‘marking’ you with their information which is then shared with any other participants in the system if you happen to visit their sites. So the more participants there are in a given cookie-tracking scheme the more successfully they could build a profile of your online habits. If every web site that existed shared a common tracking cookie, then they would all have a map of every other web site you visited.
In both these cases there are simple ways to prevent it. Most web browsers offer various cookie handling options that include “disable third party cookies” or “allow cookies from the originating web site only”. Just toggling that setting will prevent the majority of tracking cookies. There are some very persistent advertisers out there though, and there are tricks for bypassing this to achieve the same result. And there is malware that writes tracking cookies directly to your browser directory, completely bypassing its setting to disable them. For those cases most third-party malware/spyware removal or ad-blocking tools can find these rogue cookies and block them.
If even more anonymity is desired, there are anonymous web proxies out there. They visit the web sites for you, and serve you the information, so that the other web sites only ever track their IP address instead of yours. There again of course, the anonymous proxy themselves still have access to that basic information.