We are 100% tracked, 100% predicted and 100% sold
to an industry worth over US$150 billion.
Each one of us allows a huge amount of our personal data to be collected and sold by tech companies, corporates and data brokers. Our every action, search and detail is being handled recklessly and exploited for profit.
Thirty million Americans regularly watch porn online, according to the Wall Street Journal. That’s a lot more than fess up to it, even in anonymous surveys: In 2013, just 12 percent of people asked copped to watching internet porn at all. But thanks to pervasive online tracking and browser fingerprinting, the brazen liars of America may not have a say in whether their porn habits stay secret. Porn watchers everywhere are being tracked, and if software engineer Brett Thomas is right, it would be easy to out them, along with an extensive list of every clip they’ve viewed.
One of the many unfortunate fallouts from the recent hacking scandals is the harsh realization that privacy in the age of the Internet is now essentially gone. Some may argue it was never there in the first place but regardless, it’s clear today that things you do online—whether in email, instant messaging, social media or web browsing—are but a few clicks away from being exposed for all the world to see.
Scary thought, isn’t it?
It’s 2015—when we feel sick, fear disease, or have questions about our health, we turn first to the internet. According to the Pew Internet Project, 72 percent of US internet users look up health-related information online. But an astonishing number of the pages we visit to learn about private health concerns—confidentially, we assume—are tracking our queries, sending the sensitive data to third party corporations, even shipping the information directly to the same brokers who monitor our credit scores. It’s happening for profit, for an “improved user experience,” and because developers have flocked to “free” plugins and tools provided by data-vacuuming companies…
It was only a matter of time before drones started monitoring signals from mobile devices.
Since early February, several small drones flying around the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles have been determining mobile devices’ locations from Wi-Fi and cellular transmission signals.
There’s this company selling photos of your kid. And it’s all perfectly legal.
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