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