By Naomi Dolin-Aubertin
Never in human history has there been so much data available about average people. I've discussed this before when speaking about how social media gives anybody a platform to make their voice heard. In the past, it was always possible to learn about the famous, the infamous, and the top echelon of society. Corners of the world still exist in which documentation is not standardized on a national level. There are parts of this country in which citizens don't possess driver's licenses.
An yet, data multiplies daily. Much of it is data that users themselves supply: photos, videos, status posts, tweets, drawings, blog posts; a positive glut of information. If you want to see a really great and somewhat creepily-entertaining example of this, check out www.thefacehawk.com, where with your permission, the band Big Data will turn your old Facebook wall posts, photos, and friends' comments and pictures into a revolving hawk.
An even greater amount however, is gathered as people use the internet, their phones, and devices on a daily basis as members of a digital community. If you have ever searched a product or visited a retailer online, you might have noticed that advertisements for that business or item start to show up on other sites you frequent. At my last place of employ, I was responsible for ordering office supplies. And with great coincidence, ads for Staples would appear on my Pandora.
Of course, there is no coincidence here. Search engines gather data about user queries. Since advertisers pay for the privilege of your eyeballs seeing their ads, search engines tailor what you see to what they determine your preferences are.
Most websites also use tracking tools like cookies. A cookie is essentially a small file saved on your computer by the website that tells the site about your previous visits. Cookies are why items will stay in your shopping cart even after you've closed a website. They also hold any password information you may have saved or entered, which is why Facebook or other frequently visited websites don't require you to log in each time. But since cookies save information about your previous browsing history, they can also be used to track your internet usage; think back to those Staples ads. And unless you block all cookies or clear them regularly, they can be used to track your longtime internet history. (Though it should be noted, that not even clearing cookies will completely erase your history).
A perhaps less well known type of tracking is called canvas fingerprinting. Just as humans have unique fingerprints, so to do computers. Canvas fingerprinting works by analyzing how your computer renders a set of text. It "exploits the subtle differences in the rendering of the same text to extract a consistent fingerprint that can be easily obtained in a fraction of a second with user's awareness. The same text can be rendered in different ways on different computers depending on the operating system, font library, graphics card, graphics driver and the browser." This last from a very interesting draft paper called The Web never forgets: Persistent track mechanisms in the wild by a group of Belgian and Princeton scholars. What I find most disturbing about this is it completely circumnavigates any user-defined "do not track" permissions.
Working in the IT industry has certainly made me more cognizant of issues surrounding internet privacy. And while I wish I could do something about it, I suppose I'm under the impression that there is nothing in my life so interesting that is going to drive me to Tor or other measures that make my history more difficult to track. After all, there has never been so much data available about the average person, and I'm just one among billions.
Leave a comment!