Off Grid is an adventure, satire and stealth game about a mishap antihero. You play an everyman pencil pusher, who is oblivious to the city’s prying and spying, corporate-sponsored government until a series of dark events unfold.
The contemporary storyline follows real-world events surrounding data privacy, and gameplay utilises unique mechanics that allow you to manipulate the world and people around you with the data they unwittingly leave behind.
Federico Zannier has data mined himself and sold his own personal data on Kickstarter. But how much is he worth?
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.
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.
The magnitude of online information Facebook has available about each of us for targeted marketing is stunning.
Facebook made $3.2 billion in advertising revenue last year, 85 percent of its total revenue. Yet Facebook’s inventory of data and its revenue from advertising are small potatoes compared to some others. Google took in more than 10 times as much.
A new bill moving through Congress would give the authorities unprecedented access to citizens’ information.
Cookies are tracking our online behavior for advertising purposes, but a company specializing in retail analytics called Euclid, Inc. is moving that concept into real world shopping experiences.
Euclid uses open WiFi access points to track shopper behavior across stores: It does this by collecting the MAC address of smart phones as they passively connect to open networks while people shop, anonymizing the data, putting it into a giant database that then recognizes the device when it goes near any other Euclid customer’s network.
Retailers are deploying mannequins equipped with cameras that watch for shoplifters and record shopper behavior to improve sales. Several dozen EyeSee mannequins are already watching shoppers and gathering data with their camera eyes.
Companies today are increasingly tying people’s real-life identities to their online browsing habits. The widening ability to associate people’s real-life identities with their browsing habits marks a privacy milestone, further blurring the already unclear border between our public and private lives. In pursuit of ever more precise and valuable information about potential customers, tracking companies are redefining what it means to be anonymous.
An advertising network that served banners on cnn.com, orbitz.com, and 45,000 other sites has settled federal charges that it illegally exploited a decade-old browser flaw that leaks the history of websites users visit.
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