Tags: surveillance

Facebook Is Tracking Me Even Though I’m Not on Facebook | American Civil Liberties Union

But while I’ve never “opted in” to Facebook or any of the other big social networks, Facebook still has a detailed profile that can be used to target me. I’ve never consented to having Facebook collect my data, which can be used to draw very detailed inferences about my life, my habits, and my relationships. As we aim to take Facebook to task for its breach of user trust, we need to think about what its capabilities imply for society overall. After all, if you do #deleteFacebook, you’ll find yourself in my shoes: non-consenting, but still subject to Facebook’s globe-spanning surveillance and targeting network.

Facebook’s “shadow profiles” are truly egregious …and if you include social sharing buttons on a website, you’re contributing to the data harvest.

If you administer a website and you include a “Like” button on every page, you’re helping Facebook to build profiles of your visitors, even those who have opted out of the social network.

If you are responsible for running a website, try browsing it with a third-party-blocking extension turned on. Think about how much information you’re requiring your users to send to third parties as a condition for using your site. If you care about being a good steward of your visitors’ data, you can re-design your website to reduce this kind of leakage.

Doc Searls Weblog · Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica problems are nothing compared to what’s coming for all of online publishing

What will happen when the Times, the New Yorker and other pubs own up to the simple fact that they are just as guilty as Facebook of leaking its readers’ data to other parties, for—in many if not most cases—God knows what purposes besides “interest-based” advertising? And what happens when the EU comes down on them too? It’s game-on after 25 May, when the EU can start fining violators of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Key fact: the GDPR protects the data blood of EU citizens wherever they risk having it sucked in the digital world.

#davewentandroid - daverupert.com

Yeah. Fuck this. That’s creepy. Technically I opted into this feature because Google Maps asked “Google Maps would like to know your location, YES or NO?” Of course my answer was “YES” because, hey, it’s a fucking map. I didn’t realize I consented to having my information and location history stored indefinitely on Google’s servers.

I began all the work of disabling this “feature” but it seemed like a fruitless task. Also worth noting, Google Maps for iOS keeps Location History as well.

Facebook Container Extension: Take control of how you’re being tracked | The Firefox Frontier

A Firefox plugin that ring-fences all Facebook activity to the facebook.com domain. Once you close that tab, this extension takes care of garbage collection, ensuring that Facebook tracking scripts don’t leak into any other browsing activities.

Facebook and the end of the world

I’d love to see some change, and some introspection. A culture of first, do no harm. A recognition that there are huge dangers if you just do what’s possible, or build a macho “fail fast” culture that promotes endangerment. It’s about building teams that know they’ll make mistakes but also recognize the difference between great businesses opportunities and gigantic, universe-sized fuck ups.

New Dark Age: Technology, Knowledge and the End of the Future by James Bridle

James is writing a book. It sounds like a barrel of laughs.

In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle offers us a warning against the future in which the contemporary promise of a new technologically assisted Enlightenment may just deliver its opposite: an age of complex uncertainty, predictive algorithms, surveillance, and the hollowing out of empathy.

as days pass by — Collecting user data while protecting user privacy

Really smart thinking from Stuart on how the randomised response technique could be applied to analytics. My only question is who exactly does the implementation.

The key point here is that, if you’re collecting data about a load of users, you’re usually doing so in order to look at it in aggregate; to draw conclusions about the general trends and the general distribution of your user base. And it’s possible to do that data collection in ways that maintain the aggregate properties of it while making it hard or impossible for the company to use it to target individual users. That’s what we want here: some way that the company can still draw correct conclusions from all the data when collected together, while preventing them from targeting individuals or knowing what a specific person said.

Chrome’s default ad blocker strengthens Google’s data-driven advertising platforms

From a consumer’s point of view, less intrusive ad formats are of course desirable. Google’s approach is therefore basically heading in the right direction. From a privacy perspective, however, the “Better Ads” are no less aggressive than previous forms of advertising. Highly targeted ads based on detailed user profiles work subtle. They replace aggressive visuals with targeted manipulation.

Privacy could be the next big thing

A brilliant talk by Stuart on how privacy could be a genuinely disruptive angle for companies looking to gain competitive advantage over the businesses currently in the ascendent.

How do you end up shaping the world? By inventing a thing that the current incumbents can’t compete against. By making privacy your core goal. Because companies who have built their whole business model on monetising your personal information cannot compete against that. They’d have to give up on everything that they are, which they can’t do. Facebook altering itself to ensure privacy for its users… wouldn’t exist. Can’t exist. That’s how you win.

The beauty of this is that it’s a weapon which only hurts bad people. A company who are currently doing creepy things with your data but don’t actually have to can alter themselves to not be creepy, and then they’re OK! A company who is utterly reliant on doing creepy things with your data and that’s all they can do, well, they’ll fail. But, y’know, I’m kinda OK with that.

A techie’s rough guide to GDPR — Cennydd Bowles

In this excerpt from his forthcoming book, Cennydd gives an overview of what GDPR will bring to the web. This legislation is like a charter of user’s rights, and things don’t look good for the surveillance kings of online advertising:

The black box will be forced open, and people will find it’s full of snakes.

The Medium - daverupert.com

I have to keep reminding myself that I do have some control. I can build The Medium I want. I can cling to what’s good.

Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web - Neustadt.fr

With echoes of Anil Dash’s The Web We Lost, this essay is a timely reminder—with practical advice—for we designers and developers who are making the web …and betraying its users.

You see, the web wasn’t meant to be a gated community. It’s actually pretty simple.

A web server, a public address and an HTML file are all that you need to share your thoughts (or indeed, art, sound or software) with anyone in the world. No authority from which to seek approval, no editorial board, no publisher. No content policy, no dependence on a third party startup that might fold in three years to begin a new adventure.

That’s what the web makes possible. It’s friendship over hyperlink, knowledge over the network, romance over HTTP.

John Lanchester reviews ‘The Attention Merchants’ by Tim Wu, ‘Chaos Monkeys’ by Antonio García Martínez and ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ by Jonathan Taplin · LRB 17 August 2017

Triple the hand-wringing in this combined review of three books:

• The Attention Merchants: From the Daily Newspaper to Social Media, How Our Time and Attention Is Harvested and Sold by Tim Wu,
• Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine by Antonio García Martínez, and
• Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon have Cornered Culture and What It Means for All of Us by Jonathan Taplin.

What this means is that even more than it is in the advertising business, Facebook is in the surveillance business. Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens. It’s amazing that people haven’t really understood this about the company. I’ve spent time thinking about Facebook, and the thing I keep coming back to is that its users don’t realise what it is the company does. What Facebook does is watch you, and then use what it knows about you and your behaviour to sell ads. I’m not sure there has ever been a more complete disconnect between what a company says it does – ‘connect’, ‘build communities’ – and the commercial reality.

Social Cooling

If you feel you are being watched, you change your behavior. Big Data is supercharging this effect.

Some interesting ideas, but the tone is so alarming as to render the message meaningless.

As our weaknesses are mapped, we are becoming too transparent. This is breeding a society where self-censorship and risk-aversion are the new normal.

I stopped reading at the point where the danger was compared to climate change.

With New Browser Tech, Apple Preserves Privacy and Google Preserves Trackers | Electronic Frontier Foundation

It’s interesting to see how excessive surveillance is (finally!) being treated as damage and routed around. Apple seem to get it—they’re tackling the tracking issue. Meanwhile Google are focusing purely on the visibility and UX of invasive advertising, without taking steps against tracking.

There’s a huge opportunity here for Chrome’s competitors—if Firefox and Safari protect users from unwarranted tracking, that could be enough to get people to switch, regardless of the feature sets of the browsers.

Intelligent Tracking Prevention | WebKit

This is an excellent move by Apple—interpreting cross-site tracking as damage and routing around it.

Build a Better Monster: Morality, Machine Learning, and Mass Surveillance

So what happens when these tools for maximizing clicks and engagement creep into the political sphere?

This is a delicate question! If you concede that they work just as well for politics as for commerce, you’re inviting government oversight. If you claim they don’t work well at all, you’re telling advertisers they’re wasting their money.

Facebook and Google have tied themselves into pretzels over this.

Digital Assistants, Facebook Quizzes, And Fake News! You Won’t Believe What Happens Next | Laura Kalbag

A great presentation from Laura on how tracking scripts are killing the web. We can point our fingers at advertising companies to blame for this, but it’s still developers like us who put those scripts onto websites.

We need to ask ourselves these questions about what we build. Because we are the gatekeepers of what we create. We don’t have to add tracking to everything, it’s already gotten out of our control.

getsafe

Steps you can take to secure your phone and computer. This is especially useful in countries where ubiquitous surveillance is not only legal, but mandated by law (such as China, Australia, and the UK).

What should you think about when using Facebook? – Vicki Boykis

To be clear, every company currently does some form of this tracking of users. There would simply be no other way to measure operations. But Facebook has quite clearly been tiptoeing outside the bounds of what is ethically acceptable data business practices for a while.

A thorough round-up of Facebook’s current data collection practices and what you can do about it.