Episode 1 Morning Rituals
In the first episode, they asked me what news site I use and I chose CBS. After giving this information I learned that CBS had 8 party trackers that gather information about you. Trackers are an ecosystem of collecting agencies that know where you are on the web and where you have been before. Every time you browse the Internet they learn more about you. The data that is gathered by these 3rd parties are sold to advertising networks that build a profile based on the things you like. These trackers do not operate on Amazon profile because on amazon you are giving them information to build your own profile rather than other people doing it for you. My data footprint impacts everybody because the things that I put out on the web are used to judge others, assert power over others and connect us with others.
The big question is how do we avoid being tracked? According to “Do Not Track,” you can avoid being tracked through some rules, software and websites that will allow a person to “track the trackers.” Lightbeam is a plug-in for people that use Mozilla Firefox as their browser. This plug-in allows a person to see who is tracking you from the sites that were visited and identifies cookies, third parties, and how some of these trackers could be linked together. This plug-in mainly helps identify the trackers and provides an overview for the user. An American company named Ghostery can also be used to avoid getting tracked. This download blogs web snitches and allows you to see who’s tracking you and gives the user an opportunity to select who should be blocked. Another resource is Disconnect.me, which is a website created by former Google employees and lawyers. Like, Ghostery this plug-in allows users to browse the Internet more efficiently and allows users to block trackers. This is used by “Do Not Track” in some of their episodes.
A person’s privacy is priceless. We all deserve privacy but government surveillance believes differently. Our online data we give up on the web is a currency to some companies. In my opinion we shouldn’t have to pay for our privacy because as a free country we are entitled to privacy on the web. Do Not Track is a working website that really helps people like me realize how we are being tracked. It shows us the reality of the world wide web and shows us how our data is a prospering economy.
The origins of online tracking began in the 90’s with the rise of the Internet and advertising. As more people started using the Internet, advertising companies needed to make more money. A cookie is a text file and the idea is to remember you the next time you comeback. There are different types of cookies, but the one commonly used is a 3rd party cookie. These cookies are used to track people and make sure that the advertisements are posted to match the interests of that one individual. Pop up ads were created with the thought that people would actually look at them, but eventually people just learned to ignore them. Online advertising evolved from banner ads, to pop up ads and now to tracking people and creating ads based on their interest. This has transformed the Internet economy by making the Internet a source for advertisement companies to make money. Alternatives would be to pay for online services such as email and other sites but personally I am not willing to pay for these things.
To survive cookies there are three options. The first is to block cookies in your browser. Whether you use Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari, all browsers give you the choice to block cookies. The second option is to use websites or plug-ins such as Disconnect.me and Ghostery. These can be used to see who’s tracking you and allows you to block them. The third option has to do with social media. Social networks also aim at our browsers, but to stop this you can use the “ShareMeNotextension,” which prevents you from being stalked on your social media pages. These resources are effective up to a certain point. Advertising industries are always searching for new and more effective ways to continue profiling. “Trackers are always one step ahead.” Trackers are always looking for ways to not be blocked by users. An example is zombie cookies, which are cookies that are blocked by a user and then appear again later. “Tracking the trackers-it’s an endurance sport.”
The practice of “liking” is used by companies to help make a profile of you based on what you like, post or follow on Facebook and other social media sites. From this practice they can figure out your IQ, gender, race and other things about your personality. The Illumines pop up was to show us how an individual can use an online profile from sites such as Facebook and this person can gain access to health insurance and loans. The algorithms they discuss can help them find people you look similar too or see how you connect with others. The significance of a second digital self is that we can make our own online profiles that you want people to see but we don’t always have control of it once it reaches the web. No, we are not protected because now companies know a lot more about you then you wanted them to.
Not having a Facebook account doesn’t mean that you are safe from trackers and cookies. Facebook uses plug-ins and cookies to follow browsers who recently deleted their account. They also track people who have never made an account. If you have to ask me, I don’t think that we are safe from trackers. ‘You are what you like’ is basically a personality test. By looking at the things you like on Facebook they make a psychological profile for you. This was developed by David Stillwell and Michal Kosinski and collaborated with myPersonality project.
Episode 4 Spy in My Pocket
With the development of devices such as an Iphone, people now can carry a computer in their pocket. We can download apps that can help us with different things and download apps for fun such as games. I have 16-30 apps on my phone and found out that Google tracks us through IP addresses, GPS signals, wifi and other things on our phone. This can’t be prevented because when you’re connected to wifi and location services it allows for you to be tracked. Free wifi at local businesses can give companies access to your information while you’re on that wifi. In Russia people got a text message about being participants in a protest and this meant that these people were being tracked. The individual faces their information being accessed and tracked by companies. Two qualities being tracked about us are personality and behavior. No you can’t opt out because this information is online already.
Today in our society everybody has a smartphone such as Iphones and Androids, but how can we protect them from trackers? Like most people i have a lot of apps on my phone. Some of these apps need to us your personal data while other apps tend to use your personal data without you knowing. The app Clueful by Bitdefender can be used to see what information your apps are using and what apps are using information about you without your knowledge. Another way to prevent your information from being accessed is to exit out of apps after you’re done using it or you can delete apps that you don’t use anymore. Some apps use location services, which gives the app information about where you’re using it. You can turn these off in your settings avoid being tracked through your location. Advertising can also be limited on your smartphone by disabling “interest based advertising” in your settings. This does not completely stop ads because some apps still have access to your information.
Staying anonymous is another way of protecting your smartphone. Tor or Orbit are a resource that you can download to your phone, which allows you to navigate anonymously. “Off the Record” messaging apps allows a person to message others without having their messages stored into servers. Connecting to free Wi-Fi can also allow your phone to be tracked. It’s not recommended you do not use your personal accounts such as email, bank accounts, and social networking accounts. Downloading a VPN (Virtual Private Network), which allows you to connect to the internet securely when using free Wi-Fi. The Guardian project website gives users the opportunity to use tools that make images anonymous and encrypt communications. This is available in several languages and is equipped with a panic button that allows you to uninstall these tools.
Smartphones are a risk to our privacy. WIth the use of location services on the Iphone, apps now have the knowledge of where you are. These apps are also taking note of what we buy, where we buy it, who we text and email and many other things. This is all do to the explosion of GPS services. This data is used by companies to offer us services that they think we would want. Every year there are companies that create ways to record our data. These things put our privacy at risk and not much can be done to stop these companies.
Episode 5 Big Data Inside the Algorithms
Algorithms can determine what your interests are. Big data is all the information that is gathered about individuals from phones and computers. Myths that revolve around big data are we can solve more problems if we have more data. Algorithms create a social problem by assuming things about a person based on the data they have collected about somebody. When I connected to these various data points I found some to be very informative.
We can be categorized very easily. On the Internet, minorities are the most affected by prediction errors. When an individual conforms with a norm of a certain category the easier it is for their data to be taken into consideration. This can lead to misunderstandings because if someone doesn’t conform to the “norm” of a certain category then the person can be categorized wrong. Facebook has recently made a new condition where users must use their real names. Their goal was to limit hateful post but instead accounts were deleted that didn’t use a person’s real name such as domestic violence survivors accounts. This backfired for Facebook and caused a lot of criticism. Some tools that can be used to give us a glimpse into these categorizations. An extension called Floodwatch, which gives users a quick look into what advertisements are targeting us. It helps us better our browsing practices and how they affect our categorization. Another tool is to use your Google account and go to the Ad Parameters page. You can see the profile of yourself and edit it to make it more like you or you can change it to make it not like you.
The Chicago Police Department has taken a big step into how police solve crimes. As one of the best funded Police departments in the nation, the Chicago police have incorporated the use of algorithms to predict crimes before they happen much like the pre-cogs in the movie The Minority Report. In Chicago a 22 year old man with no criminal record that lives in a neighborhood known for crime was approached by a police officer. The police officer told the man at his house that if he were to commit a crime that there would be major consequences and that “we’re watching you.” This man was added to list of 400 people known as the “heat list.” The goal of this is to predict crimes and to better solve them. Many argue that this could lead to misconceptions of individuals and invades the privacy of many. In the movie The Minority Report, a task force put in place to arrest those who were going to commit a crime. Although this theory may sound genius and life saving, the bigger question is what if they weren’t gonna actually commit the crime?
Janet Vertesi, an assistant sociology professor at Princeton University decided to do an experiment to see if she could hide her pregnancy from big data. She began with social media and she made sure to be careful about what she post and what her friends post about her. She told the people close to her to not post anything about her pregnancy online. Using Tor she ordered everything baby related on there to avoid data collectors. Vertesi was not worried about ads but she was worried about data collectors that could target her because of her pregnancy. If Vertesi could buy things with cash she would or she would use an amazon account using a private email address and have everything she ordered sent to locker with a different address. This was her way of separating her online life and offline life. Janet Vertesi stopped using anything Google because of recent news that they collect our data. She says this experiment was hard work and expensive due to the fact that she had to buy things only through certain sites and had to be way more aware of her social media.
Civil rights is still an ongoing problem in our society. According to Wade Henderson, President and CEO of The Leadership Conference of Civil and Human Rights, writes “Big data can and should bring greater safety, economic opportunity, and convenience to all people. At their best, new data-driven tools can strengthen the values of equal opportunity and equal justice.” Big data also bring risks such as inaccuracies in databases can cause serious civil rights harms. An example of this is the E-Verify program which is a government-run system that employers can use to see if which workers are eligible. There have been a high number of errors from this program especially towards foreign born workers. This program is an example of how programs are not transparent enough.
The filter bubble is information that users are able to see on their social media news feed because of the things they liked or commented on. This has an impact because now you know that you’re being tracked and they are using the information to specify what should show on your feed. The truth is not always there in full because we don’t get the whole story about what is really happening. Optimization is turning something bad into good.
Filter bubbles are something Eli Parsier uses to describe how companies like Google are using filters to give us certain results based on the things we look at on the Internet. He uses his two friends who research Egypt. During that time mass protest was occurring in Egypt and was making headlines everywhere. One friend got news links about the protest in the his first page. The other got links to other things that weren’t even relevant to the current news at the time. This showed how we all have Filter Bubbles around us. He explains how the Internet should connect us all and we should have more control of what we can see rather than a company like Google choosing what we can see.
Facebook claims that it’s not their fault for the way your news feed is, but it’s actually our faults. They claim their news feed ranking algorithm is not the reason your news feed is the way it is. They argue that our news feed is based off of what we look at on facebook, what we like, what we pos and who we are friends with. Their algorithm has made it so a person will only click on things that have to with their ideology and not cross cutting content or in other words content that doesn’t match your ideology. They did a study on people who self-reported their political slants to figure out what should pop up on each users news feed.. This study had it’s flaws because only 9% of Facebook users actually claim their political stance. This means that this sample does not really represent the majority of Facebook user. Since we all have different friends on Facebook this means that some of our friends might have different political views, which could affect the content that we receive in our news feed. This showed that “filter bubble” does exist on Facebook, but is not as strong as people think. This study was done by Facebook and this could have an impact on the results. If another company was to do this study of Facebook I think the results would come out differently.
According to Eduardo Graells-Garrido at the Univeristat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Mounia Lalmas and Daniel Quercia of Yahoo Labs say they have found a way to burst the filter bubble. They created the idea that “although people may have opposing views on sensitive topics, they may also share interests in other areas.” They built a recommendation engine that guides people to others who share the same views. This results in the exposure of people to different opinions, ideas and people. After some studies using this concept, they found that people who voice their opinion about sensitive topics are more likely to see other opposing views and will be more susceptible to change.
Episode 7 To Change the Future Click Here
When the Internet was first created it changed the perspective people had on the world. The world was evolving and the future was here. Through computers we could connect everybody around the world. Edward Snowden was an American citizen that obtained confidential documents that the government kept. The government feared that those documents could put the National Security of the United States at risk. The significance of 9/11 is that after this horrifying terrorist attack the government started to make moves towards ending terrorism. They started by making people give up privacy for security. These things worry me, but I always watch what I put on the Internet and the government has to do these things to help keep our nation safe from future attacks.
Since Edward Snowden leaked the confidential documents about the U.S. and the U.K. we have learned a lot. We learned the National Security Agency (NSA) and U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have been monitoring the internet and phone activity of millions of people around the world. The documents informed us that Google, Facebook and Microsoft were forced by the NSA to hand over customer data secretly. The NSA also recorded and stored every phone call or message sent to Mexico, Kenya and the Philippines. Now that people know we are being spied on by our government many have opposed this. In a poll of 13 countries, Amnesty International found that 71% of people oppose being under surveillance when on the Internet. From these documents, American and British judges have both concluded that the sharing of intercepted communications between both countries and the amount of phone records the U.S. had were illegal. These things have all led to companies improving their privacy policy on their software. Government surveillance has also been criticized because it violates our human right according to the U.N. Some of the largest technology companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple and many more have launched a campaign to end bulk data collection. The government has been signing into law new acts that make surveillance companies more transparent but little has changed.
Privacy matters for many different reasons, but the most important is that we are entitled to it. Government surveillance has shows that our information on the web is not so private after all. The best solution is to be smart about how you use the Internet. Some tips could be browse carefully, putting something over the camera of your laptop or being careful about using free public Wi-Fi. Using stronger passwords can also improve the chances of securing your privacy. To reclaim our privacy we must avoid certain companies that record our data. We must also encrypt our privacy to make sure that it stay private. We should care about our digital footprint because it is important as it plays a role in experience one faces online. The future of our privacy lies with the development of new technology that gives us more privacy. In my opinion the government will always look into surveillance because they claim it’s for the safety of the country.
After completing this interactive documentary I learned a lot about tracking on the Internet and how we are always being watched when we go on the Internet. The documentary was interesting because it knew where I was and what kind of computer i was using and that kind of gave me an idea of what tracking really is. Some unsettling things i learned was about smartphone apps and how they access information without you even knowing. This made me think twice about what I do or put on my phone.
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