When I first activated the Firefox add-on Collusion from Mozilla a few weeks ago, it was more out of curiosity than anything else. After a week's worth of relatively average online activity, the graph showing which sites were tracking me had exploded into an indecipherable mass of interlinked dots and lines, and I started feeling a little uncomfortable.
These companies aren't following people to make life easier for them; they're simply making it easier for them to spend money.
Lezette Engelbrecht, online features editor
The idea to download the plugin came after watching a recent TED talk by Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs, in which he shares his experience with Collusion and the scary facts it revealed about who was following him online. A typical day of surfing, blogging, and bit of social networking resulted in over 150 sites tracking his personal information, almost all of them without his consent.
Collusion allows users to see which third-party advertisers are monitoring their activities across the Web, by creating a real-time graph of these tracking cookies. The graph shows the sites you have actually visited, each represented by a circle with a halo around it, with lines connecting it to cookies the site or its advertisers have placed on your browser, each indicated by a grey or red circle. The red circles represent behavioural tracking sites, which monitor the links you click on, content you view and searches you make. Grey sites are non-behavioural trackers, but may still follow you around.
As you can see from the demo graph on the left, it only takes a few clicks before the tracking sites smell blood. In this example, I “visited” three sites; there are now 10 trackers watching my movements.
It's a given that going online will result in at least some form of tracking - some would argue it's a tolerable trade-off for a free Web experience. And sure, some of it can be useful in terms of delivering more relevant, customised content. But what is unsettling is how vast and invisible the practice truly is. Visit a popular site like Facebook or YouTube, for example, and you could soon have a trail of followers gathering data about your browsing habits, interests, spending behaviour and relationships.
Most of these tracking sites don't make themselves known at all, so users are often oblivious to the army of online tails feeding on their personal information. Equipping people with greater insight into the nature and number of these sites was one of the main motivations for the development of Collusion.
As Mozilla acknowledges on the Collusion page, “If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold” (Andrew Lewis). And we should have a choice in that.
Cyber spaghetti
Perhaps you aren't phased about a string of advertisers following and collecting information about you. How much can they really find out, after all? But the problem comes in when the same sites rely on the same tracking cookies, meaning advertisers can effectively track you across the Web, building up a trove of data for market research.
Now it's not only a case of having a tail, but a whole horde of them sharing your information. The guy who saw you at the gym chats to the one who followed you to your boyfriend's house, and both of them dish with the one who rifled through your financial statements. Then they can do what the add-on's name implies - collude. Some companies are already using this knowledge to control what an individual user sees on the sites it's affiliated with, not just the ads, but the actual content as well.
Of even greater concern is what happens when the disparate tracking systems in our lives - cellphones, location-based services, surveillance cameras, online shopping sites and social networks - all begin linking up. There's a theory about gender differences that describes men's brains as waffles (compartments) and women's as plates of pasta (connected). That's another column for another day, but the point in the second instance is that everything is connected: if you have a bowl of spaghetti and try to follow a single strand, you're certain to intersect several other pieces along the way. It's called the Web for a reason - things link up, they are understood in relation to the information and networks around them.
Like the circles in the Collusion graph, one piece of data doesn't remain isolated for long. Before you know it, it's connected to thousands of other bits of personal information, and there's a veritable army of organisations and potential thieves collecting details about you and your habits. Not only things like name, age, date of birth and the like, but where you live, what motivates you, how you spend your money, which articles you read, illnesses you may have, your relationships.
Tracking sites and their subscribers use all these pieces to weave context - that coveted quality being pursued by every major tech and consumer company out there. Each byte of data on these numerous tracking sites form a piece of the puzzle organisations are building about you - a puzzle that is growing all the more detailed, and accurate.
Future spies
If one looks at how technology has progressed in just 20 years, imagine what could develop in the next 10 in terms of monitoring devices embedded into our lives. Already services are emerging that are capable of collecting highly detailed, real-time information, and using it in increasingly sophisticated ways.
Alohar Mobile, for example, has developed a platform for apps that use sensing technology to understand user behaviour. These apps can automatically detect the location and names of places you visit, when you arrive and leave, and how long you spend there - without you ever “checking in”. It can even tell whether you're driving, walking or standing still. All this means marketers can send highly targeted information when you're in a specific place, at a specific time, doing a specific thing. Maybe that's helpful once in a while. Maybe being told there's a sale on as you walk by your favourite store helps you bag a bargain. But is that really a worthwhile trade off?
And let's not kid around about intention. These companies aren't following people to make life easier for them; they're simply making it easier for them to spend money. As Kovacs notes, there are big profits to be made the tracking game - the revenue of the top handful of companies in this space is over $39 billion.
The thing here is information and choice. Privacy is not a luxury, it's a right, and the fact that so few 'trusted' sites are upfront about their tracking policies is concerning. While this isn't likely to change anytime soon, there are also a growing number of tools to keep the watchers at bay. Mozilla is busy developing the Collusion add-on so users will not only be able to see who is tracking them, but also block these tracking sites. This could prove particularly important as the so-called digital generation starts getting online at younger ages. Kovacs notes that in a single morning, over a two-hour period of visiting principally children's sites, his nine-year-old daughter's Collusion profile spawned a throng of watchers.
”Imagine in the physical world if someone followed our children around with a camera and a notebook and recorded their every movement. I can tell you now there isn't a person in this room that would sit idly by. We'd take action.”
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