Get Smart On Tracking
What you do online is your business, and you can keep it that way. The SmartOn Series is like your Internet owner’s manual: the place to learn the smartest, most useful intel and tips from Mozilla policy peeps and programmers.
The future of loneliness
At the end of last winter, a gigantic billboard advertising Android, Google’s operating system, appeared over Times Square in New York. In a lower-case sans serif font – corporate code for friendly – it declared: “be together. not the same.” This erratically punctuated mantra sums up the web’s most magical proposition – its existence as a space in which no one need ever suffer the pang of loneliness, in which friendship, sex and love are never more than a click away, and difference is a source of glamour, not of shame.
Juking the Stats : Over-reliance on data makes the public go blind
I struggle with the widespread adoption of data these days. This may sound strange since I’ve always loved math and I’ve worked with data my entire career (and still do). The White House now has a Chief Data Scientist, and demand for people in my field seems to have exploded over the past few years. But I’m concerned about how quickly data as a practice is spreading across companies, not because it’s a bad trend in and of itself but because of how some people are using metrics. Let me explain.
Hashtag Data Positive
Privacy, safety, and security aren’t sexy topics, and neither are condoms and STIs. But understanding them is critically important to being able to enjoy sex responsibly. And sex positivity, as a social construct, recast “consensual sexual activities as fundamentally healthy and pleasurable, [encouraging] sexual pleasure and experimentation.”
How to survive in a cookie environment
“By continuing to browse this site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies to offer you content and services tailored to your interests.”
Have you had enough of this message that has been popping up all over the Internet these past few months? As we all know, the easiest thing to do is click “OK” and you’re rid of it.
But if you should ever get it in your head to say “No”, just one click won’t do it – you need a whole tutorial.
First option: block cookies in your browser
Every Internet browser allows you to block third-party cookies – those files that follow you around on the Internet from site to site.
- Firefox: Settings -> Privacy tab -> Rules for setting conservation -> Use custom settings for history.
- Internet Explorer: Tools -> Internet Options -> Privacy tab -> Settings -> Move cursor up -> click OK.
- Chrome: Settings menu -> Show Advanced Settings -> click Content Settings -> then select the “Block third-party cookies and site data” tick box -> click OK.
- Safari: Settings -> Safari -> Block cookies -> Always block.
Second option: Use an add-on
Following episode 1, we were given a list of tools to track or block certain trackers, including cookies.
Disconnect, for example, is a small extension that displays the cookies used by the site to which you are navigating on the browser bar at all times.
Third option: Use the ShareMeNot add-on
The first two methods make it possible to bypass cookies from advertisers; however, social networks also aim their radar at our browsers (you will learn more about that in episode 3 of Do Not Track). To remove these, you must use the ShareMeNotextension, which blocks social network buttons and prevents you from being stalked by Facebook, Twitter or Google+. Note that the new PrivacyBadger extension combines the functionality of Disconnect and ShareMeNot.
You can also test all of your favourite websites with Cookiepedia, to see the type and number of cookies that are placed on users’ machines (only available in English). That is what we’ll be doing in episode 2.
“Just don’t go on the Internet”
But to be fully protected from tracking is not easy. The advertising industry is working on new ways to continue online profiling despite the predicted decline in cookies. As the head of an advertising agency confided in a moment of candour in a Forbes article: “If you don’t want anyone to know what you do on the Internet, just don’t go on the Internet.”.
The cookies on which the warning messages on our browsers focus are already technologically obsolete.
Fingerprinting identifies each computer that browses a site according to its configuration (software installed, owned fonts, clock settings etc.). The website Am I Unique ? gauges the accuracy of this tool, which can distinguish between different computers connected to the network almost without fail. Am I unique on the Internet? Yes, indeed! PrivacyBadger has reported working on a method to block fingerprinting.
Trackers are always one step ahead
The latest invention is zombie cookies, which rise up from their own ashes after having been deleted by users. Turn, an American advertising agency, managed to develop a system that identifies users to Verizon, an Internet access provider, even if they block or delete cookies. Faced with the outcry over revelations by Julia Angwin (interviewed in Do Not Track) on these practices, Turn had to give up and kill its zombie cookies for good.
But the science of tracking continues to develop. A bit like the new substances that are undetectable by anti-doping tests, trackers are always one step ahead of the activists who are developing the tools to escape them. Tracking the trackers – it’s an endurance sport.
Vincent Glad
Facebook tracks users, even those who don’t use it, says privacy report
Belgium’s data protection body has accused the social network of using plug-ins and cookies to follow users who have deleted their profile or never signed up for an account.That means the social media giant is breaching European law requiring users to choose whether to have tracking cookies placed on their device or not.
What are you revealing online? Much more than you think
What can be guessed about you from your online behavior? Two computer privacy experts — economist Alessandro Acquisti and computer scientist Jennifer Golbeck — on how little we know about how much others know.
Where Were You 3 Minutes Ago? Your Apps Know
Dozens of smartphone apps collect so much location data that their publishers can plot users’ comings and goings in detail, a forthcoming peer-reviewed study found.
Many, many Facebook users still don’t know that their news feeds are filtered by an algorithm
For heavy Facebook users, let alone social media gurus, the idea that Facebook’s news feed is filtered by an algorithm is very, very old news. But a majority of everyday Facebook users in a recent study had no idea that Facebook constructs their experience, pushing certain posts into their stream and leaving others out. And worse, many participants blamed themselves, not Facebook’s software, when friends or family disappeared from their news feeds.
Will big data help end discrimination—or make it worse?
The rise of big data technology allows marketers to collect a tremendous amount of information about an individual with very little to start with. The challenge with having that kind of power? Keeping discrimination out of the picture.
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