Do Not Track

An interactive series debuting at the Tribeca Film Festival’s Storyscapes provides a personal demonstration of the realities of data and privacy.

How do you make mass surveillance relevant to the average person? Well, you could make the issue all about dick pics, like John Oliver did last week. Do Not Track, a new documentary web series premiering online today, is taking a less carnal approach: the site scoops up your data and uses it to give every episode a terrifyingly personal touch.

Do Not Track aims to demystify the opaque world of data collection. Websites often use a number—sometimes dozens—of third party trackers on every page to pilfer your data and either use it for advertising purposes or sell it to the people who can. Most of the time, you’re probably blissfully unaware of this. And even if you knew, would you change how you use the web?

Brett Gaylor is creator and director of the show that reveals how we are being followed online by a host of companies.

Interactive media can still sometimes feel like a Choose Your Own Adventure book: fun and novel, but also kind of contrived and limited. But Do Not Track, a docu-series about data privacy that launched Tuesday, uses audience participation in a great way. As the series goes through different aspects of online data collection, it uses the examples of your choice to show how much data sharing is going on behind the scenes online, and how easy it is to develop profiles about Web users.

Not all stories have happy endings. Brett Gaylor, a documentary filmmaker who calls himself an activist for a free and open Internet, developed the web series “Do Not Track” as a cautionary tale about the web as a menacing, all-seeing eye.

“Over the past couple of years, aspects of the Internet began to bug me,” he said. “I became less of a web evangelist and am now more critical of the amount of personal information being mined.”

Last week, I added a program to my Web browser that does nothing but eat cookies – the little tracking files placed on my computer as I surf the Web. The program tells me whose cookies it’s wiping out as I go from one site to another, and most of them are from websites I’ve never visited. That’s because they’re placed by third parties, who have contracted with the websites I do visit to monitor my activity and Web habits. That data is being added to any number of personal profiles of me, which I may neither see nor delete.

Who are you, what do you do and who is watching you do it?

Three simple questions, posed by a new interactive documentary called Do Not Track. If you’re curious to know exactly what information you’re offering up online when you visit websites, then you’ll want to take part in the interactive portions of their upcoming sessions which run from now until June.

Immediately upon clicking the ‘Play’ button, Do Not Track let’s me it knows where I live and that it’s a nice day outside. Hunched over my laptop in my office chair, my body straightens, an unbidden eye glancing out the window. Creator of this seven-part web documentary on data mining, Brett Gaylor, narrates the invasion of your privacy throughout—very effectively making you grateful for the fact that, at the very least, advertising companies don’t do voice-overs while mercilessly tracking your every online movement.

While many people realize that businesses and governments track their activities online, the vast majority do not realize the extent to which tracking occurs and how much information about them is available to parties whom they do not know.

A new online interactive documentary, premiering today at the Tribeca Film Festival New York, and available for free online, seeks to change that by educating Internet users (i.e., most of humanity) in a clear and fun fashion about the risks that they truly need to understand.

Do Not Track will air in a series of episodes to be released over the next two months; the first two of which are now live, and are well worth watching.