Link tags: surveillance

Doc Searls Weblog · How the cookie poisoned the Web

Lou’s idea was just for a server to remember the last state of a browser’s interaction with it. But that one move—a server putting a cookie inside every visiting browser—crossed a privacy threshold: a personal boundary that should have been clear from the start but was not.

Once that boundary was crossed, and the number and variety of cookies increased, a snowball started rolling, and whatever chance we had to protect our privacy behind that boundary, was lost.

The Doctor is incensed.

At this stage of the Web’s moral devolution, it is nearly impossible to think outside the cookie-based fecosystem.

Some long-winded thoughts on privacy policies and consent popups — Piper Haywood

A deep dive into GDPR.

Got Google Analytics on your site? You should probably read this.

Data isn’t oil, so what is it? - How To Measure Ghosts

The discussions around data policy still feel like they are framing data as oil - as a vast, passive resource that either needs to be exploited or protected. But this data isn’t dead fish from millions of years ago - it’s the thoughts, emotions and behaviours of over a third of the world’s population, the largest record of human thought and activity ever collected. It’s not oil, it’s history. It’s people. It’s us.

Signal >> Blog >> The Instagram ads Facebook won’t show you

The way most of the internet works today would be considered intolerable if translated into comprehensible real world analogs, but it endures because it is invisible.

You can try to use Facebook’s own tools to make the invisible visible but that kind of transparency isn’t allowed.

A quick look at privacy-focused analytics for small sites

A round-up of alternatives to Google Analytics.

Google Is Testing Its Controversial New Ad Targeting Tech in Millions of Browsers. Here’s What We Know. | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Following on from the piece they ran called Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea, the EFF now have the details of the origin trial and it’s even worse than what was originally planned.

I strongly encourage you to use a privacy-preserving browser like Firefox or Safari.

Cookie Consent Speed.Run

My current score is one minute and 18 seconds. Can you beat it?

Daring Fireball: Google’s Outsized Share of Advertising Money

Same hat!

Privacy-invasive user tracking is to Google and Facebook what carbon emissions are to fossil fuel companies — a form of highly profitable pollution that for a very long time few people in the mainstream cared about, but now, seemingly suddenly, very many care about quite a bit.

MailTrackerBlocker

I use Apple’s Mail app for my email so this is very handy:

An email tracker, read receipt and spy pixel blocker plugin for macOS Apple Mail.

Introducing State Partitioning - Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog

This is a terrific approach to tackling cross-site surveillance. I’d love it to be implemented in all browsers. I can imagine Safari implementing this. Chrome …we’ll see.

supercookie • workwise

Favicons are snitches.

Why The IndieWeb? (Webbed Briefs)

Heydon keeps on producing more caustically funny videos that are made for me. After the last one about progressive enhancement, this one is about the indie web.

This is the story of the birth of the web, its loss of innocence, its decline, and what we can do to make it a bit less gross.

Global Privacy Control — Take Control Of Your Privacy

This sounds a lot like Do Not Track …but looking at the spec, the interesting part is the way that this is designed to work in combination with legal frameworks. That’s smart. I don’t think a purely technical solution is workable (as we saw with Do Not Track).

Simple Analytics - Simple, clean, and privacy-friendly analytics

Another nice alternative to Google Analytics with a focus on privacy.

Contextual ads | Dave Smyth

If behavioural ads aren’t more effective than contextual ads, what is all of that data collected for?

If websites opted for a context ads and privacy-focused analytics approach, cookie banners could become obsolete…

Facebook’s Attempt to Vilify Apple — Pixel Envy

See, that’s what I’m talking about;

Levy deftly conflates “advertising” and “personalized advertising”, as if there are no ways to target people planning a wedding without surveilling their web browsing behaviour. Facebook’s campaign casually ignores decades of advertising targeted based on the current webpage or video instead of who those people are because it would impact Facebook’s primary business. Most people who are reading an article about great wedding venues are probably planning a wedding, but you don’t need quite as much of the ad tech stack to make that work.

No cookie for you - The GitHub Blog

I wish more companies would realise that this is a perfectly reasonable approach to take:

We decided to look for a solution. After a brief search, we found one: just don’t use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really. 🤔

So, we have removed all non-essential cookies from GitHub, and visiting our website does not send any information to third-party analytics services.

Why The Web Is Such A Mess - YouTube

Tom gives a succinct history of the ongoing arms race between trackers and end users.

Coded Bias Official Trailer on Vimeo

Coded Bias follows MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini’s startling discovery that many facial recognition technologies fail more often on darker-skinned faces, and delves into an investigation of widespread bias in artificial intelligence.

Plausible Analytics | Simple, privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics

Another alternative to Google Analytics—nice and lightweight too!