Staying Safe online and on Wattpad

Popularity or privacy? Part One: Corporate Trolls and Spooks

We want to be popular. The internet is a way to make us famous or infamous. It's a tool to show our friends what's happening in our lives, presenting our achievements, our pictures; it's a platform for voicing our opinions to the world. We have been trained to SHARE. It can also make us money if we know how. It can generate funds if we attract visits to our website, page or profile – especially if what we say or do is popular. Popular websites, or someone with over 100k followers, can bring in $7,000 a week from advertisers and tracking scripts if they're clued up.

If we don't mind cheating, or want to improve our status or product sales, we can buy thousands of fake followers, likes and positive reviews for our social networks from individuals or 'marketing' companies. Or we could pay Google or Facebook to direct our product, page or website toward people who have an interest in what we do and may even want to pay for it.

But how does FB know this market of people will be interested in our work? Because it is a 'collector' of its users' information – as it freely admits in its privacy policy.

(SEE LINK 1 below: FB privacy policy)

But how does FB know this market of people will be interested in our work? Because it is a 'collector' of its users' information – as it freely admits in its privacy policy. (SEE LINK 1 below: FB Privacy Policy) I believe its original purpose, as dramatised in the film, The Social Network, has been replaced by this all-consuming desire to collect personal data for profit.  In fact, every corner of the internet is controlled by a handful of corporate behemoths, all of which collect data about their users and sell it on for profit – mostly without the users' knowledge.

I applaud any website that tries to give information and advice on internet safety (Check out WP's safe surfing thread and add any advice, or tell me what you think of it). SEE LINK 2 BELOW

But most of them could do more, and only scratch the surface of what can happen on the internet. This is mainly because they too are making money from data collection practices that may put their users at a disadvantage, especially regarding privacy.

FB builds profiles on every one of its users, their age, their real name, email address, what they look at, what they buy, comment on, like or dislike, download, etc, and uses that profile to sell on to other 'interested third parties' or charge advertisers to place certain 'targeted' ads they think we may prefer. FB and all the other high profile companies with huge online traffic make millions from this corporate data trading on a daily basis. They are the collectors.

But, as collectors go, Google is king. Google can determine what every computer on the internet is looking at. They also offer services, free and premium, that help websites and individuals gather information about their own users. SEE GOOGLE ANALYTICS LINK BELOW.

Google's estimated to profile billions of internet users across the globe in great detail. They can sell on this information if they wish and offer big bucks for data that other companies might collect. They use the information to match adverts to our daily lives. If we tweet, post, search or even send an email about a subject, the big G will collate that data and calculate the optimum choice of product to match that subject. Then they can arrange with their partners to serve ads that match our profiles – the things we search and the subjects we discuss.

Naturally, the world's spying services became very interested in these profiles a few years back – if the collectors could work out what we buy through private access to our lifestyles, it meant security services could find out more about us too. The NSA recruited Google and other 'collector' companies in their little spook games like Prism and Tempora.

SEE LINK 5 & 6 ~ NSA and Prism

And the resulting expressions of horror from the Europeans: SEE LINK 7

Before getting their own house in order SEE LINK 8 EURO SHAME.

Luckily. Ed Snowden let the world know about how Verizon was giving all its customers' private information to the NSA (SEE LINK 9 VERIZON) in return for stealthy spyware, and who else was doing it.

Most internet corporations collect data for money or to improve their monetisation (a word that will crop up from time to time) techniques.

Only Yahoo refused to share its user data when the NSA demanded it. (SEE LINK 10 YAHOO) Unfortunately, they were forced to pass on user details by the US government or face a fine of $250,000 per day until they complied. They have recently been purchased by Verizon.

Here is a list of ten companies alleged to have taken part in passing on their own users' details to the US and UK governments (and maybe others) and possibly installing back doors into some of their products to aid government spying, although most have denied it:

Google

Facebook

Microsoft

Apple

Yahoo!

YouTube

Skype

PalTalk

AOL

Dropbox

To know and yet think we don't know is the highest attainment.

Not knowing and thinking we know is a disease.

Lao Tzu