One of the Fastest-Growing Businesses on the Internet: Spying on Internet Users
July 31st, 2010The piece provides an interactive graphic to explain what you can do to counter this advertiser surveillance stuff, but nowhere does the word AdBlockPlus appear. Woops. *chuckle* This will block most ads from loading in the first place. (Yes, AdBlockPlus blocks ads on Cryptogon.)
I like Ghostery because it’s easy to use, but NoScript is much more powerful/cumbersome.
I mainly use this stuff to conserve bandwidth. Getting into a lather about this, in terms of privacy, is somewhat silly because none of this does anything to protect you from the surveillance that’s occurring on the wire by ISPs and governments. Go ahead and block this stuff if it makes you feel better, or helps you conserve bandwidth, but don’t kid yourself into thinking that you are hiding anything from your ISP or your government, where the genuinely terrifying surveillance occurs, by using these methods. You would have to take much more extreme measures to actually maintain your privacy online if the enemy is a government, or a corporation that is colluding with a government.
A quick note on Flash:
Flash is a bandwidth hog (my main concern) and it’s pretty insidious from a privacy perspective. I use Flashblock to block all Flash by default. If there’s a Flash element on a page that I want to see, I only allow that element to load. It’s very simple and fast to use.
Via: Wall Street Journal:
One of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found, is the business of spying on Internet users.
The Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry.
The study found that the nation’s 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred. The nonprofit Wikipedia installed none.
Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to “cookie” files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them.
These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.
The new technologies are transforming the Internet economy. Advertisers once primarily bought ads on specific Web pages—a car ad on a car site. Now, advertisers are paying a premium to follow people around the Internet, wherever they go, with highly specific marketing messages.
It’s rarely a coincidence when you see Web ads for products that match your interests. WSJ’s Christina Tsuei explains how advertisers use cookies to track your online habits.
In between the Internet user and the advertiser, the Journal identified more than 100 middlemen—tracking companies, data brokers and advertising networks—competing to meet the growing demand for data on individual behavior and interests.
Wow.