I want to come back to Facebook as an user. I want to connect with my online friends once again. I want to see what they are up to. But until the day I feel comfortable enough sharing anything on Facebook, I will avoid your site like a plague. Can you please help ex-users like me rebuild the lost confidence of using your social network?
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.
You’ve probably heard about the controversial Facebook study. But manipulating the News Feed is Facebook’s entire business.
The conventional wisdom is that if you’re not paying for anything, then you are the product being sold. But that line of thinking is pretty superficial — it ignores both the value people do get out of Facebook and the actual way Facebook makes money.
On Facebook, advertisers can pay to make sure their targeted stuff shows up in your News Feed. There’s just a few sponsored entries mixed into the usual endless scroll of stuff your friends have shared. Ads are designed to change our emotions and advertisers are paying Facebook to manipulate your emotions by changing the News Feed.
What we’re mad about is the idea of Facebook having so much power we don’t understand — a power that feels completely unchecked when it’s described as “manipulating our emotions.”
How unique and trackable is your browser?
Is your browser configuration rare or unique? If so, web sites may be able to track you, even if you limit or disable cookies. “Fingerprinting” may prove a more robust tracking technology than cookies.
Panopticlick tests your browser to see how unique it is based on the information it will share with sites it visits.
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.
Ghostery shows you the invisible web : cookies, tags, web bugs, pixels, beacons and companies interested in your activity. Then it helps you learn about those companies, so you can make informed decisions about what you are/aren’t willing to share, and control your online privacy.
After you’ve seen what’s tracking you, you can decide whether or not you want to block any or all of the companies in Ghostery’s library. Are there some marketers you trust, but others you’d rather turn away?
The FBI is getting set to deploy its own system of computerized facial recognition, called NGI. It will bring together millions of photos in a central federal database, reaching all 50 states by the end of the year.
But compared with Facebook’s DeepFace system it isn’t very good. Give Facebook two pictures, and it can tell you with 97 percent accuracy whether they’re the same person, roughly the same accuracy as a human being in the same spot. To be fair, Facebook has a whole network’s worth of data on its side.
The nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency is getting outgunned by a social network.
In this thought-provoking, highly accessible exploration of the issues around personal data-gathering, Julia Angwin provides a startling account of how we’re all being tracked, watched, studied, and sorted. Her own (often very funny) attempts to maintain her online privacy demonstrate the ubiquity of the dragnet—and the near impossibility of evading it. I’ll never use Google in the same way again.”
—Gretchen Rubin, bestselling author of Happier at Home and The Happiness Project
“Digital gerrymandering” represents a frightening future. Here’s how to prevent it.
On November 2, 2010, Facebook’s American users were subject to an ambitious experiment in civic-engineering: Could a social network get otherwise-indolent people to cast a ballot in that day’s congressional midterm elections?
The answer was yes.
In the 3rd episode of this four-part series, Dr Aleks Krotoski gives the lowdown on how commerce has colonised the web and reveals how web users are paying for what appear to be ‘free’ sites and services in hidden ways. She is joined by some of the most influential business leaders of today’s web, including Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon), Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google), Chad Hurley (CEO of YouTube), Bill Gates, Martha Lane Fox and Reed Hastings (CEO of Netflix).
Aleks Krotoski also explores how web advertising is evolving further to become more targeted and what this may mean for our notions of privacy.
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