Tracking the trackers Gary Kovacs

I don’t know why but I’m continually

amazed to think that two and a half

billion of us around the world are

connected to each other through the

internet and that at any point in time

more than 30 percent of the world’s

population can go online to learn to

create and to share and the amount of

time each of us is spending doing all of

this is also continuing to grow a recent

study showed that the young generation

alone is spending over eight hours a day

online is the parent of a nine year old

girl that number seems awfully low but

just as the Internet has opened up the

world for each and every one of us it

has also opened up each and every one of

us to the world and increasingly the

price we’re being asked to pay for all

of this connectedness is our privacy

today what many of us would love to

believe is that the Internet is a

private place it’s not and with every

click of the mouse and every touch of

the screen we are like Hansel and Gretel

leaving bread crumbs of our personal

information everywhere we travel through

the digital woods we are leaving our

birthdays our places of residence are

our interests and preferences our

relationships our financial histories

and on and on it goes

now don’t get me wrong I’m not for one

minute suggesting that sharing data is a

bad thing in fact when I know the data

that’s being shared and I’m asked

explicitly for my consent I want some

sites to understand my habits it helps

them suggest books for me to read or

movies for my family to watch for

friends for us to connect with but when

I don’t know and what I haven’t been

asked that’s when the problem arises

it’s a phenomenon on the internet today

called behavioral tracking and it is

very big business in fact there’s an

entire industry formed around following

us through the digital woods and

compiling a profile on each of us and

when all of that data is held they can

do almost whatever they want with it

this is an area today that has very few

regulations

even fewer rules except for some of the

recent announcements here in the United

States and Europe it’s an area of

consumer protection that’s almost

entirely naked

so let me expose this lurking industry a

little bit further the visualization you

see forming behind me is called

collusion and it’s an experimental

browser add-on that you can install in

your Firefox browser that helps you see

where your web data is going and who’s

tracking you the red dots you see up

there our sites that are behavioral

tracking that I have not navigated to

but are following me

the blue dots are the sites that I’ve

actually navigated directly to and the

grey dots our sites that are also

tracking me but I have no idea who they

are all of them are connected as you can

see to form a picture of me on the web

and this is my profile so let me go from

an example to something very specific

and personal I installed collusion in my

own laptop two weeks ago and I let it

follow me around for what was a pretty

typical day now like most of you I

actually start my day going online and

checking email I then go to a news site

look for some headlines and in this

particular case I happen to like one of

them on the merits of music literacy in

schools and I shared it over a social

network our daughter then joined us at

the breakfast table and I asked her is

there an emphasis on music literacy in

your school and she of course naturally

as a nine-year-old looked at me and said

quizzically what’s literacy so I Center

online of course to look it up now let

me stop here we are not even two bites

into breakfast and there are already

nearly 25 sites that are tracking me I

have navigated to a total of four so let

me fast-forward through the rest of my

day I go to work I check email I log

onto a few more social sites I blog I

check more news reports I share some of

those news reports I go look at some

videos pretty typical day in this case

actually fairly pedantic and at the end

of the day as my day winds down look at

my profile the red dots

have exploded the gray dots have grown

exponentially

all in all there’s over a hundred and

fifty sites that are now tracking my

personal information most all of them

without my consent I look at this

picture and it freaks me out this is

nothing I am being stalked across the

web and why is this happening pretty

simple

it’s huge business the revenue of the

top handful of companies in this space

is over thirty nine billion dollars

today and as adults we are certainly not

alone at the same time I installed my

own collusion profile I installed one

for my daughter and on one single

Saturday morning over two hours on the

Internet here’s her collusion profile

this is a nine-year-old girl navigating

to principally children’s sites I move

from this from freaked out to enrage

this is no longer me being a tech

pioneer or a privacy advocate this is me

being a parent imagine in the physical

world if somebody followed our children

around with a camera and a notebook and

recorded their every movement I can tell

you there isn’t a person in this room

that would sit idly by we’d take action

it may not be good action but we would

take action we can’t sit idly by here

either this is happening today

privacy is not an option and it

shouldn’t be the price we accept for

just getting on the Internet

our voices matter and our actions matter

even more today we’ve launched collusion

you can download it install it in

Firefox to see who is tracking you

across the web and following you through

the digital woods going forward all of

our voices need to be heard because what

we don’t know can actually hurt us

because the memory of the Internet is

forever we are being watched it’s now

time for us to watch the Watchers thank

you