NSA? DoD? U.S. Navy? Police surveillance? What the hell is going on? How is it possible that a privacy tool was created by the same military and intelligence agencies that it’s supposed to guard us against? Is it a ruse? A sham? A honeytrap? Maybe I’m just being too paranoid…
Unfortunately, this is not a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory. It is cold hard fact.
Many Internet advertisers rely on cookies. The problem for marketers is that some users set their browsers to reject cookies or quickly extinguish them. And mobile phones, which are taking an increasing chunk of the Web usage, do not use cookies.
Advertisers and publishers are increasingly turning to something called fingerprinting. It allows a web site to look at the characteristics of a computer such as what plugins and software you have installed, the size of the screen, the time zone, fonts and other features of any particular machine. These form a unique signature just like random skin patterns on a finger.
A multinational security firm has secretly developed software, called Riot, capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behavior by mining data from social networking websites.
Raytheon, the world’s fifth largest defence contractor, has acknowledged the technology was shared with US government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system capable of analysing “trillions of entities” from cyberspace.
“People should be asking themselves what happens with this data, what type of inferences can be drawn from this data,” says Marc Goodman.
“If your self-tracking health device shows that you lead a sedentary lifestyle, then maybe you will pay more for insurance,” Consumers should be careful about letting any company track health data that can be used against them.
If your growing weariness of being constantly tethered to the internet has become overwhelming, it might be time to scrub yourself from the social media sphere altogether. Here’s how you can become a ghost on the Internet, by tracking down and eliminating your digital past.
— Read on Comparitech.com
Some say you should only be concerned about privacy if you have something to hide. The Zero Knowledge Privacy Foundation hired Newsbound to help explain why this is the wrong way to think about the issue.
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