Staying Safe online and on Wattpad

Layer #5 ~BROWSERS (Part 4): Add-ons that can protect us

There is a real battle going on in the coding world. It is between the Collectors, advertisers, hackers, spooks and their minions and the 'Protectors of Privacy' a different movement of developers, hackers and spooks dedicated to outwitting the first lot. Both sides are pretty crazy and most want to make money from their users. We are stuck in the middle.

These next chapters lay out the PUPs some of us don't even know we are experiencing and the apps and add-ons (or layers) people have written to prevent them.

I am wandering into a bloody battlefield here. Many website owners are horrified when anyone mentions ways of restricting how their pages work because they believe it could break their site and/or lose them money.

The majority of website users (us) trust the websites to not spy on them or implement complex design structures that load widgets, scripts and beacons purely written to make their sponsors money. The trouble is, some people don't trust the web. They use browser tools to protect themselves. This may make certain websites fail to work properly because they hadn't bargained on many using these tools. I think the majority of website users (us) do not know about protective add-ons so websites have got sneakier and sneakier to make a buck. They would rather people who protect themselves online (safe surfers) stop doing so because it means they have to rewrite and adapt their website design to allow for these tools. Tools that may be at odds with what their sponsor might want.

Personally, I would prefer they built their websites with user security issues as the priority and not just profit, but, as some of them say, profit drives the internet and not content or user security. In other words, the user is there to be used.

They insist revenue from adverts or advertisers' scripts/cookies are the only way to fund a website, or even the internet itself. They believe they can only get their funding from advertising cartels who insist these cookies and scripts are put on their sites as part of the deal. The advertisers want to tailor their adverts to suit every consumer by tracking what we do and supplying us with the adverts they think we want. They never consider the possibility that the consumer might not want to see ANY adverts at all. That is unthinkable for them and the road to ruin.

Popular websites often roll out the same old cliché: if you want this site to stay free then suck up the adverts or the complex web design with its sneaky scripts. As we pigeons say in the UK: this is complete bollocks. The internet began with no advertising at all. The early Nineties web overflowed with innovative ideas and exciting concepts from talented individuals who created a cyber dreamscape that stretched the human imagination. Inevitably, the dark side seeped in with internet porn and its cutting edge advertising and hacking technologies and these paved the way for what we have now. But there was still positive innovation, not necessarily profit driven. Indeed, crowd funding had brought a new way of generating revenue that wouldn't exist without the internet.

I do sympathise with the many struggling websites which depend on advertising revenue to survive, but it is only the successful ones who really make money from the exploitation of their users because advertisers will pay more to website with bigger followings and a larger volume of juicy user data.

The arguments about this subject occasionally spill out onto the sidewalks of cyberspace and LINK1 features a couple.

Not all websites are goody goodies and not all are secure. Some can be imitated, scraped, bypassed and hacked. Malicious codes end up on our computers or phones because websites, (and sub-domains, scripts, and hackers) put them there, whether the original website means to or not. I am about to point out layers that assassinate ads, stymie scripts and block beacons. Normally this secret disclosure would probably initiate some brown stuff hitting the fan, but it's only us pigeons here – a handful of flocklings – so there goes.