Staying Safe online and on Wattpad

PUP #12 Who's tracking you? The Collectors - How do they track us?

My research for this chapter is aided by Stanford University's Third-Party Tracking: Policy and Technology paper (2011) and a study by German browser, Cliqz, who have recently part-purchased Ghostery from Evidon. Both are available below in PDF format:

LINK1 Cliqz: Tracking the Trackers

StanfordUniversity's Third-Party Tracking: Policy and Technology paper

As I said in the last chapter there are thousands of companies involved in the lucrative business of collecting data from online users. Although the 4th amendment of the American Constitution covers 'unreasonable search and seizure' and is 'against government breach and the privacy properties of data contained in a device', 80% of US citizens have had their online privacy compromised. Not only through government intercepts and malicious attackers (sometimes the same thing), but data mining by the largest corporations in the world (and their ad networks).

It never used to be like this

In the early days of the internet, website owners actually designed and hosted their own content. They invented ways of collecting and saving our preferences using early cookie technology – originally to improve their site by checking how we navigated it or what our favourite pages were. Cookies remembered our passwords and browser settings, meaning our next visit would be smoother and more convenient because the cookie reminded the website who we were and what we had put in our shopping baskets during a visit. Back then we could actually reject cookies if we wished, which meant having to constantly click the 'I don't want any freaking cookies' button about ten times, especially on the larger more invasive corporate sites. We were urged to allow them if we 'wanted a better experience'. I don't know what they meant by this (perhaps the experience was better for them) and corporations still say this stuff on their websites. Nowadays, disallowing cookies  is discouraged. :) 

The process was almost anonymous in the beginning, before they added an ID number which recognised us on every return visit (if we kept cookies). Some websites even checked if we clicked an advert – and that made the corporations and their advertiser partners sit up and take notice.

I often think things were better in the past, when everyone was a little more naïve or corporations were a little less greedy or hadn't quite worked out all their angles. On that logic they will only get worse in future. But perhaps the best value, or the best times we can have, are in the now. I wonder if I am right.

Advertisers and marketers had always claimed there was no money in the internet, but with the online population growing fast that soon changed. The web gave corporations the chance of identifying readymade markets for different products. The most popular websites were offered money to allow advertisers access to the site's design and later, even its user data (now called pseudo-anonymous data because it had an ID number for each user). In the 1990s, if someone clicked a flashy ad for Air Jordans, that one random click represented a world of possibilities. It wasn't just about one potential sale, the adman/merchandiser believed there was a market for ANY footwear; maybe any basketball related product, Chicago Bulls or Washington Wizards merchandise or memorabilia and endless other possibilities for even more sales from just one user. That random click could've been a mistake too, of course, or a result of a badly designed website, but advertisers and their marketers would never allow that possibility into their mind. They let their imagination run riot on ways of making money. That one user would have to buy their product at some point in his life, so why not profile him? They were aiding his internet experience by checking his every move, weren't they? They even employed the old techniques they'd used in other media like TV/radio ads or phone cold calling. Once web designers adapted them to a more visual version, or simply as email spam, the corporations were on the internet to stay and began to shape the online sprawl to suit their way of operating.