Tags: surveillance

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Screening Surveillance

Three short films set in the near future from the suitably ominous-sounding Surveillance Studies Centre. The Black Mirrorlets are:

Goodbye Google Analytics, Hello Fathom - daverupert.com

Dave stops feeding his site’s visitors data to Google. I wish more people (and companies) would join him.

There’s also an empowering #indieweb feeling about owning your analytics too. I pay for the server my analytics collector runs on. It’s on my own subdomain. It’s mine.

Accessibility Events | CSS-Tricks

If you’re using Apple’s VoiceOver, both your phone and your computer will broadcast your assumed disability to the entire internet, unless and until you specifically tell it to stop.

Apple’s new feature a step towards digital apartheid - Axess Lab

I also discussed this accessibility events feature with my friend who is a screen reader user herself. She said it feels like it’s a first step towards a well-meant digital apartheid.

Minimal Google Analytics Snippet | Minimal Analytics

If you really, really have to add Google Analytics to a sites, here’s a way to do it in a more performant way, without the odious Google Tag Manager.

An Interview with Nick Harkaway: Algorithmic Futures, Literary Fractals, and Mimetic Immortality - Los Angeles Review of Books

Nick Harkaway on technology in fiction:

Humans without tools are not magically pure; they’re just unvaccinated, cold, and wet.

SF is how we get to know ourselves, either who we are or who we might be. In terms of what is authentically human, SF has a claim to be vastly more honest and important than a literary fiction that refuses to admit the existence of the modern and goes in search of a kind of essential humanness which exists by itself, rather than in the intersection of people, economics, culture, and science which is where we all inevitably live. It’s like saying you can only really understand a flame if you get rid of the candle. Good luck with that.

And on Borges:

He was a genius, and he left this cryptic, brilliant body of work that’s poetic, incomplete, astonishing. It’s like a tasting menu in a restaurant where they let you smell things that go to other tables and never arrive at yours.

Forget privacy: you’re terrible at targeting anyway - apenwarr

A spot-on description of how targetted advertising works …or rather, how it doesn’t.

They are still trying to sell me car insurance for my subway ride.

Deface

A browser extension that encrypts and decrypts posts on Facebook—if two users have the extension installed, they can communicate without Facebook being able read their messages.

So We Got Tracked Anyway

Even using a strict cookie policy won’t help when Facebook and Google are using TLS to fingerprint users. Time to get more paranoid:

HTTPS session identifiers can be disabled in Mozilla products manually by setting ‘security.ssl.disablesessionidentifiers’ in about:config.

The costs and benefits of tracking scripts – business vs. user // Sebastian Greger

I am having a hard time seeing the business benefits weighing in more than the user cost (at least for those many organisations out there who rarely ever put that data to proper use). After all, keeping the costs low for the user should be in the core interest of the business as well.

On using tracking scripts | justmarkup

Weighing up the pros and cons of adding tracking scripts to a website, from a business perspective and from a user perspective.

When looking at the costs versus the benefits it is hard to believe that almost every website is using tracking scripts.

The next time, you implement a tracking script it would be great if you could rethink it and ask yourself if it is really worth it.

Private by Default

Feedbin has removed third-party iframes and JavaScript (oEmbed provides a nice alternative), as well as stripping out Google Analytics, and even web fonts that aren’t self-hosted. This is excellent!

Changing Our Approach to Anti-tracking - Future Releases

This is excellent news from Mozilla. Firefox is going to make it easier to block vampiric privacy-leeching and performance-draining third-party scripts and trackers.

In the physical world, users wouldn’t expect hundreds of vendors to follow them from store to store, spying on the products they look at or purchase. Users have the same expectations of privacy on the web, and yet in reality, they are tracked wherever they go.

The Bullshit Web — Pixel Envy

There is a cumulative effect of bullshit; its depth and breadth is especially profound. In isolation, the few seconds that it takes to load some extra piece of surveillance JavaScript isn’t much. Neither is the time it takes for a user to hide an email subscription box, or pause an autoplaying video. But these actions compound on a single webpage, and then again across multiple websites, and those seemingly-small time increments become a swirling miasma of frustration and pain.

I agree completely. And AMP is not the answer:

Given the assumption that any additional bandwidth offered to web developers will immediately be consumed, there seems to be just one possible solution, which is to reduce the amount of bytes that are transmitted. For some bizarre reason, this hasn’t happened on the main web, because it somehow makes more sense to create an exact copy of every page on their site that is expressly designed for speed. Welcome back, WAP — except, for some reason, this mobile-centric copy is entirely dependent on yet more bytes. This is the dumbfoundingly dumb premise of AMP.

Laura Kalbag – Insecure

The web can be used to find common connections with folks you find interesting, and who don’t make you feel like so much of a weirdo. It’d be nice to be able to do this in a safe space that is not being surveilled.

Owning your own content, and publishing to a space you own can break through some of these barriers. Sharing your own weird scraps on your own site makes you easier to find by like-minded folks. If you’ve got no tracking on your site (no Google Analytics etc), you are harder to profile. People can’t come to harass you on your own site if you do not offer them the means to do so

Fixing these webs - daverupert.com

I’m a fan of fast websites. Your website needs to be fast. Our collective excuses, hand-wringing, and inability to come to terms with the problem-set (There is too much script) and solutions (Use less script) of modern web development is getting tired.

I agree with every word of this.

Sadly, I think the one company with a browser that has marketshare dominance and could exert the kind of pressure required to stop ad tracking and surveillance capitalism is not incentivized to do so.

So the problem is approached from the other end. Blame is piled on authors for slow first-party code. We’re told to use certain mobile publishing frameworks that syndicate to proprietary CDNs to appease the gods of luck and fortune.

Cory Doctorow: Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags – Locus Online

Facebook doesn’t have a mind-control problem, it has a corruption problem. Cambridge Analytica didn’t convince decent people to become racists; they convinced racists to become voters.

“I Was Devastated”: Tim Berners-Lee, the Man Who Created the World Wide Web, Has Some Regrets | Vanity Fair

Are we headed toward an Orwellian future where a handful of corporations monitor and control our lives? Or are we on the verge of creating a better version of society online, one where the free flow of ideas and information helps cure disease, expose corruption, reverse injustices?

It’s hard to believe that anyone—even Zuckerberg—wants the 1984 version. He didn’t found Facebook to manipulate elections; Jack Dorsey and the other Twitter founders didn’t intend to give Donald Trump a digital bullhorn. And this is what makes Berners-Lee believe that this battle over our digital future can be won. As public outrage grows over the centralization of the Web, and as enlarging numbers of coders join the effort to decentralize it, he has visions of the rest of us rising up and joining him.

Consently - Privacy-friendly and GDPR compliant tracking

This looks very useful: a script that will allow visitors to tailor which tracking scripts they want to allow. Seems like a win-win to me: useful for developers, and useful for end users. A safe and sensible approach to GDPR.

Identifying, Auditing, and Discussing Third Parties – CSS Wizardry

Harry describes the process he uses for auditing the effects of third-party scripts. He uses the excellent Request Map which was mentioned multiple times at the Delta V conference.

The focus here is on performance, but these tools are equally useful for shining a light on just how bad the situation is with online surveillance and tracking.