Doit-on vraiment s’inquiéter de tout ce que le Web peut savoir sur nous? Ça dépend. En participant à la grande création collaborative que représente la série webdocumentaire Traque interdite, j’ai développé, comme plusieurs de mes collègues, une réaction paradoxale – à mi-chemin entre la curiosité de découvrir des avancées technologiques étonnantes et l’envie paranoïaque d’envelopper mon cellulaire dans du papier alu.
Should we really be worried about everything that the Web may know about us? That depends. While participating in the large collaborative webdocumentary series Do Not Track, I developed, as did several of my colleagues, a paradoxical reaction – somewhere between curiosity to discover amazing new technologies and the paranoid desire to wrap my cell phone in tinfoil.
Discovering everything that the new Web economy knows about is disturbing. Did you know that many mobile apps access your GPS, your contacts or your calendar, even though it isn’t necessary in order for them work? (see episode 04)?
Prediction is an industry, and its product is a persuasive set of hopes and fears that we’re trained or convinced to agree upon. It’s a confidence trick. And its product comes so thick and fast that, like a plothole in an action movie, we’re carried on past the obvious failures and the things that didn’t even make sense if we had more than five seconds to think about them.
At Facebook’s request I have again deactivated the *official* version of the extension. Furthermore, Facebook has deactivated location sharing from the desktop webpage so the extension will not work. However, it seems locations are still being shared on the mobile app and sharing is still enabled by default.
What if your credit scores were assessed based on your Facebook likes and your health insurance plan on your Netflix history? Do Not Track, a web-based documentary series about Internet privacy and data collection, shows that our digital footprint may soon become an even more integral part of our lives.
Directed by Brett Gaylor, this interactive series is meant as a warning call for all those who believe their browsing history to be of little importance. By accessing viewers’ IP address, favorite websites, and Facebook accounts, the web doc personalizes its content, providing viewers with geographically relevant GIFs, different narrators, and even the Big Five personality traits that apply to them. Consequently, no two screenings are the same, and we get an astonishing real-time look at how our data is being tracked, analyzed, and sold.
Each episode is accompanied by a selection of articles and videos relevant to the topic at hand, allowing us to further our understanding of issues such as the tracking industry and its economic origins, cookie files, and online profiling.
Is it possible to keep the Internet from realizing that you’re pregnant? That’s the question Princeton sociology professor Janet Vertesi set out to answer in 2013 when she discovered that she was expecting. Her nine-month experiment required her to think like a criminal about how she could go about leaving no trace of her bundle of joy in any of her email activity. She had to call family and friends and tell them not to talk about the pregnancy on Facebook. She and her husband bought baby products — like prenatal vitamins — in person in cash. When she did buy things online, she used Tor to mask her IP address and conceal her identity while browsing, bought items with gift cards from Rite Aid, and had them shipped to an Amazon locker so her home address wouldn’t be associated with the orders.
Eli Pariser – Beware online “filter bubbles” – TED
As web companies strive to tailor their services to our personal tastes, there’s a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a “filter bubble” and don’t get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview.
It’s been hard to make a living as a journalist in the 21st century, but it’s gotten easier over the last few years, as we’ve settled on the world’s newest and most lucrative business model: invasive surveillance. News site webpages track you on behalf of dozens of companies: ad firms, social media services, data resellers, analytics firms — we use, and are used by, them all.
For years, as a regular writer at Wired, I watched this system grow up with unease. I watched more companies put tracking cookies and scripts in every article I wrote. As my career went on, that list kept getting longer. Unlike most of the people I worked with at Wired, I understood the implications of what we were doing. Most journalists have no idea how extensive the system their readers are sold into is, but I have no such excuse. Long before I was a journalist, at the very dawn of the era of the web, I worked in database marketing — what’s more commonly called analytics now.
I got into it from the internet side, but for marketers who built databases of consumer information, the web was love at first sight. The introduction of the browser cookie was a transcendent moment in data collection. It was like the first time a kid at Hogwarts used their wand. You knew it was big, but how big? All you could say is “This will be bigger than I can imagine now.” — and that’s what I told people.
The better we get at modeling user preferences, the more accurately we construct recommendation engines that fully capture user attention. In a way, we are building personalized propaganda engines that feeds users content which makes them feel good and throws away the uncomfortable bits. We used to be able to hold media accountable for misinforming the public. Now we only have ourselves to blame.
At an 18th-century mansion in England’s countryside last week, current and former spy chiefs from seven countries faced off with representatives from tech giants Apple and Google to discuss government surveillance in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s leaks.
The three-day conference, which took place behind closed doors and under strict rules about confidentiality, was aimed at debating the line between privacy and security.
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