10 Things Online Data Collectors Won't Say
They
know your online browsing secrets.
We
reveal their hidden tactics.
1. "We're always watching
you."
If you're reading this on the Internet,
chances are you're being followed. More than 200 data collection companies and
ad networks use approximately 600 different tracking technologies to gather and
sell information on people's web habits, according to Abine,
an online privacy firm that tracks the trackers. The online advertising
industry is a $31 billion business fueled largely by behind-the-scenes exchanges
of consumers' personal online shopping and browsing habits.
Web-based commercial data collectors
work by quietly dropping bits of code called cookies on user computers, which
allow collectors to track what people read, click or buy. That information,
collected by companies such as BlueKai and DoubleClick (a Google subsidiary), is sold in real-time
exchanges to ad networks, which then target segments of users with ads fitting
their interests. Someone who just searched Expedia for information on Puerto
Rico, for example, would be almost instantly hit with ads featuring
Companies in the
2. "You can't really opt out of
data tracking..."
People may "opt out" of the
targeted advertising so common on the web, but that doesn't mean data
collectors will stop following their every electronic move. In 2010, the
Digital Advertising
And those who click "opt
out" only get a temporary reprieve from the ads. As soon as they clear
their browser cookies, users inadvertently opt back in, experts say, because
they also get rid of the cookie that told ad networks not to target them.
Consumers' best bet, say experts, is downloading a powerful, free add-on like Abine's, which works on all major browsers and continually
updates itself to protect users from new trackers.
3. " And 'Do Not Track' options
won't stop us either."
In addition to "opting
out," many web browsers now offer "do not track" options, which
actually send a signal to data collectors telling them not to track users.
Various web browsers have different default settings for tracking. Safari, for
example, automatically blocks third-party cookies that track users. Firefox accepts
cookies, so it is up to the users to go into the settings and turn them off.
Right now "opt out" and
"do not track" are often the same in practice. In fact, recent
privacy debates have centered on the ambiguous definition of the terms.
Currently there is no industry-wide "do not track" standard. Studies
show most web users interpret it to mean their data will not be collected, but
the online ad industry interprets it to mean the same thing as opting out,
Woolley says. Tracking companies will continue to collect information on web
users, but they won't target them with ads based on their data.
Unfortunately not all data tracking
companies comply with do-not-track requests, says Sarah Downey, a lawyer and
privacy expert for Abine. "Right now, do not track
doesn't necessarily stop data collection or development of profiles about
you," says
Currently the Federal Trade
Commission is pushing browser makers to adopt do-not-track tools and
encouraging online ad networks to respect users' do-not-track settings. In a
report on digital privacy released by the FTC recently, the agency said it
would support legislation that defines "do not track" as zero data
collection.
4. "We know your secrets."
Data trackers may know a woman is
pregnant even before she tells her loved ones. They figure it out based on the
web pages and advertisements clicked on recently. Target recently came under
fire for combing through customer shopping patterns to identify potential
soon-to-be-parents. Like other retailers, Target assigns its shoppers with a
personalized code that lets the company record their every interaction with the
store, from e-mails to web browsing to physical store visits. (Target declined
to comment.) True, this kind of data crunching is mostly innocuous, but many
web users have a word to describe it: creepy.
Retailers have used predictive
analytics for years to help parse customer buying patterns -- and consumers
often benefit. After all, it's not the worst thing to see ads for bridal
dresses just as one's planning a wedding. Browsing and purchase history
tracking by retailers provide value to a customer they would miss if they
weren't tracked, says Fatemeh Khatibloo,
an analyst for Forrester Research who covers the consumer data economy.
The potential danger, say privacy
experts, is data trackers' access to a new realm of information on the web.
"It's not just your past purchase history," says Chris Conley, a
technology and civil liberties fellow for the ACLU of
Such practices would be against
industry standards, says Woolley. "Marketing data should never be used to
make those kinds of decisions. It should only be used for marketing
purposes," she says.
5. "We don't know your
name..."
As powerful as the data-tracking
tools are, the one thing the software often doesn't know is: the user's real
name. Instead, consumers' page visits are tied to a random string of numbers
designed to keep personally identifiable information private. These unique IDs
follow a user around the web, informing data trackers which ads he or she is
statistically likely to click based on past web-browsing habits.
Data brokers like Acxiom say they
screen collected information to make sure it was obtained according to their
privacy standards. "Our program qualifies all of the data we bring
in" to ensure consumer privacy is protected, says Jennifer Barrett
Glasgow, the company's chief privacy officer.
6. "...but we can probably
figure it out."
The more online data trackers know
about you, the anonymous web surfer, the easier it becomes for them to tie it
to you, the person. For example, if a user is the only 65-year-old grandmother
in
Joseph Turow,
a University of Pennsylvania professor studying Internet database marketing,
maintains it's easy for multiple data collectors to combine databases and
identify users. "Eventually someone might get you to fill out a form containing
your name," says, author of "The Daily You: How the New Advertising
Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth." Prior to that
"you were User 56765 based on your cookies. You were anonymous, and now
you're not," he says -- and this lack of anonymity makes users more
vulnerable to identity fraud.
Woolley, however, says people should
"absolutely not" be worried that data collectors will waste resources
identifying individuals. "Nobody has an interest in doing that," she
says. "Advertisers are interested in aggregated data -- entire categories
of people who are interested in a particular product."
But just because data trackers don't
have the time to trace anonymous data back to individuals doesn't mean nobody
will. In 2006, Netflix released customer movie-rankings as data sets in a
contest without identifying individuals by name. But the company drew the ire
of customers and the Federal Trade Commission after some users were able to figure out the names of people ranking the
movies. The company reached a deal with the FTC and canceled the contest. A similar incident happened when AOL
released its search logs in 2006, prompting an apology from the company. These
cases show that not all data collectors and ad agencies take proper steps to
protect sensitive personal information, privacy experts say.
7. "We control who sees the
best discounts and deals."
The web does not treat all users
equally. Because data collectors can infer things like one's income level and
credit score based on sites visited, they can also influence which products
people see advertised what prices they are charged, Turow
says. Companies like Acxiom use high-powered analytics tools to group web users
into like categories based on monetary indicators, media consumption, age and
other factors. They can sell their clients access to specific audiences,
letting marketers pinpoint customers with the highest value and bypass the users
who'll never click on an ad.
Data collectors "affect what ads
consumers see and what coupons they get," Turow
says. When they categorize consumers, "it may affect the way we see the
world and see ourselves," he adds. To be sure, categorizing consumers
"has been happening in marketing for decades," says Khatibloo. "The best customers get the $10 gift card
or a free gift and the ones who don't spend any money, don't," she adds.
8. "We're tracking your smartphone, too."
The smartphone
revolution didn't go unnoticed by data trackers. Consumers now spend 94 minutes
daily on mobile apps and 72 minutes surfing the web on their phones, according
to Flurry, an analytics and advertising company. Smartphone users are gold
mines for data trackers and ad networks, which are often integrated into mobile
apps, experts say. These so-called ad libraries have "access to your
contacts, geo-location, call records, and other information that's stored on
your phone," says Conley. On a computer, by comparison, data trackers can
only see what one does in a web browser window.
Mobile ad networks target smartphone owners by tracking actions tied to a unique
device identification number, a cookie-like code specific to each smartphone. These IDs let ad networks know where the owner
of a particular smartphone has been on the mobile
web. And that allows app-makers and advertisers to better target phones with
ads. They can track users as they move from app to app to learn more about
their interests. Unlike cookies within the web browser on a laptop, the unique
ID on mobile apps can't be erased. This is potentially dangerous because of the
sheer amount of data people keep on their phones, says Conley.
In February, a mobile
social-networking app called Path was discovered to be uploading the full
names, emails and phone numbers of contacts stored in its users' phones --
without their permission. If Path had been hacked,
After the Path incident, Apple
stepped up efforts to phase out unique device IDs. But advanced tracking
companies like
9. "The information we have on
you could be wrong."
Just because data trackers try their
best to know your every move on the web doesn't mean they always get it right.
Carole Sharwarko,
a 33-year-old woman in
Marketing mix-ups like these are
perhaps more annoying than harmful. But where erroneous data on individuals can
cause trouble, say privacy experts, is in the case of commercial data
collectors. These sites gather information on individuals from publicly available
sources into detailed dossiers available to anyone online for little or no
cost. Many of these firms are unregulated. One data collection site, Spokeo, combines the data users willingly share online with
public records mined from phone books, marketing surveys, real estate listings
and other sources, according to its website. "It's basically an FBI
background check for $3.95,"
There's no one-stop shop where users
can view and edit the digital profiles data brokers create for them. But the
FTC targeted such companies in its recent consumer privacy report calling for
legislation that would give consumers access to data collected about them and
allow them to edit it when necessary.
Sites like Reputation.com already
monitor and correct erroneous information about its users -- for a fee.
Insurance companies and employers may vet potential applicants by searching
them online, says Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik,
so scrubbing the web of this kind of data protects users from harm. Simple web
browsing information collected by data tracking firms, however, wouldn't fall
under Reputation.com's radar. So, for now at least,
consumers like Sharwarko have no recourse but to
ignore the misfired ads.
10. "Your personal data may be
worth thousands of dollars."
In a report last year, the World
Economic Forum called personal data the "new oil," a valuable
resource of the 21st century that's fueling a new wave of economic activity.
The online ad industry alone is expected to balloon to $34 billion this year,
according to analysts. Though it's hard to put a dollar amount on the value of
one person's data to a data broker or ad firm, estimates range from a fraction
of a cent for a single piece of data to $5,000 for a full digital profile.
Buyers of certain products, like luxury goods or expensive health-related
devices, are worth more to advertisers, Fertik says,
so ad networks will pay more to reach them.
What's more, Turow
says, data collectors often lure users into handing over even more information
with the promise of gifts and coupons. "You might think you're getting a
free gift, but once you give out that information, your value goes up far more
than the value of whatever they've given you," he says. People should be
wary of handing over personal details like their names, addresses or birthdates
to marketers, he advises.
-------------------------------------
Your
Cell Phone Makes You A Prisoner Of A Digital World
Where Virtually Anyone Can Hack You And Track You
http://endoftheamericandream.com
http://albertpeia.com/cellphoneprisonershackedandtracked.htm
If you own a cell phone,
you might as well kiss your privacy goodbye. Cell phone companies know
more about us than most of us would ever dare to imagine. Your cell phone
company is tracking everywhere that you go and it is making a record of
everything that you do with your phone. Much worse, there is a good
chance that your cell phone company has been selling this information to anyone
that is willing to pay the price - including local law enforcement. In
addition, it is an open secret that the federal government monitors and records
all cell phone calls. The "private conversation" that you are
having with a friend today will be kept in federal government databanks for
many years to come. The truth is that by using a cell phone, you
willingly make yourself a prisoner of a digital world where every move that you
make and every conversation that you have is permanently recorded. But it
is not just cell phone companies and government agencies that you have to worry
about. As you will see at the end of this article, it is incredibly easy
for any would-be stalker to hack you and track your every movement using your
cell phone. In fact, many spyware programs allow hackers to listen to you
through your cell phone even when your cell phone is turned off. Sadly,
most cell phone users have absolutely no idea about any of this stuff.
The next time that you get a notice
from your cell phone company about "changes" to the privacy policy,
you might want to play close attention. Your cell phone company might be
about to sell off your most personal information to anyone that is willing to
write a big enough check. The following is from a recent CNN article....
Your
phone company knows where you live, what websites you visit, what apps you download,
what videos you like to watch, and even where you are. Now, some have begun
selling that valuable information to the highest bidder.
In
mid-October, Verizon Wireless changed its privacy policy to allow the company to
record customers' location data and Web browsing history, combine it with other
personal information like age and gender, aggregate it with millions of other
customers' data, and sell it on an anonymous basis.
So who is buying this information?
We just don't know.
But we do know that local law
enforcement agencies all over the country are increasingly using cell phone
data to nail suspects, and often it is the cell phone companies that are the
ones selling them the cell phone data that they need.
According to a recent New York Times article, many
local police departments are doing this without getting a warrant first....
"Law
enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province
mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool
for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court
oversight."
That same article says that cell
phone companies have standard prices that they charge to local law enforcement officials
for information that they request....
"Cell
carriers, staffed with special law enforcement liaison teams, charge police
departments from a few hundred dollars for locating a phone to more than $2,200
for a full-scale wiretap of a suspect."
So if you are breaking the law, your
cell phone may be used to gather evidence and to track you down. In the
Sometimes the police don't even use
the cell phone companies. Recently, the Wall Street Journal ran
an article that discussed the capabilities of the "stingray devices"
that many local law enforcement agencies are using now.
A "stingray device" acts
like a cell phone tower and it can gather any information that a normal cell
phone tower can. The following is how a recent Wired
article described these "stingrays"....
You
make a call on your cellphone thinking the only thing
standing between you and the recipient of your call is your carrier’s cellphone tower. In fact, that tower your phone is
connecting to just might be a boobytrap set up by law
enforcement to ensnare your phone signals and maybe even the content of your
calls.
So-called
stingrays are one of the new high-tech tools that authorities are using to
track and identify you. The devices, about the size of a suitcase, spoof a
legitimate cellphone tower in order to trick nearby cellphones and other wireless communication devices into
connecting to the tower, as they would to a real cellphone
tower.
The
government maintains that the stingrays don’t violate Fourth Amendment rights,
since Americans don’t have a legitimate expectation of privacy for data sent
from their mobile phones and other wireless devices to a cell tower.
Isn't that just great?
The attitude that law enforcement
agencies seem to have is that once we use a cell phone we are essentially
willingly throwing our Fourth Amendment rights out the window.
In some areas of the
The
devices, sold by a company called Cellebrite, can
download text messages, photos, video, and even GPS data from most brands of
cell phones. The handheld machines have various interfaces to work with
different models and can even bypass security passwords and access some
information.
Fortunately these "extraction
devices" are being challenged in court. Let us hope that they will
be banned.
But what local law enforcement
officials are doing pales in comparison to what federal agencies are doing.
For example, the FBI claims that it can demand to see
your cell phone data whenever it would like to.
Not only that, the FBI has also been remotely activating the microphones on the cell
phones of suspects that they want to listen to. This can be done even
when the cell phone is turned off....
The
FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in
criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and
using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.
The
technique is called a "roving bug," and was approved by top
Could the FBI be listening to you
right now?
If there is a cell phone in the room
they could be.
But some other federal agencies
listen to a lot more cell phone calls than the FBI does.
It has been an open secret for a long
time that the federal government monitors and records all cell phone calls that are
made for national security reasons.
In fact, the federal government is
even trying to collect records for calls that have been made in the distant
past. According to USA Today, the goal is "to
create a database of every call ever made"....
The
National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of
tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and
BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told
In addition, the federal government
has been constructing the largest data center in the history of the world out
in the
Under
construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named
But isn't it illegal for the federal
government to intercept our phone calls?
Well, the cold, hard reality of the
matter is that they use all kinds of loopholes and legal technicalities to get
around that.
For example, if a call is
"intercepted" outside of the
Of course that is a bunch of
nonsense, but that is how they think.
And it is very frightening thing for
governments around the world to be able to monitor and track us like this.
Increasingly, governments around the
world are using cell phones to hunt down people that they do not like and haul
them off to prison. For example, a recent Bloomberg article detailed how
the Iranian government is aggressively using cell phones to crack down on
dissidents....
The
Iranian officers who knocked out Saeid Pourheydar’s four front teeth also enlightened the
opposition journalist. Held in Evin Prison for weeks
following his arrest early last year for protesting, he says, he learned that
he was not only fighting the regime, but also companies that armed
Pourheydar,
30, says the power of this enemy became clear as intelligence officers
brandished transcripts of his mobile phone calls, e-mails and text messages
during his detention. About half the political prisoners he met in jail told
him police had tracked their communications and movements through their cell
phones, he says.
Christians in
Most Americans don't need to worry
about getting hauled off to prison for political or religious reasons at this
point, but there is another aspect of cell phone security that could
potentially affect all of us.
Most Americans are completely unaware
of what stalkers can potentially do if they are able to hack into a cell
phone. For example, did you know that spyware can make it possible for a
stalker to monitor where you are 24 hours a day and listen to everything that
you say even when your cell phone is turned off? The following is from an
article posted by WTHR....
Spyware
marketers claim you can tap into someone's calls, read their text messages and track
their movements "anywhere, anytime." They say you can "catch a
cheating spouse", protect your children from an evil babysitter and
"hear what your boss is saying about you." And while you're spying on
others, the Spyware companies say "no one will ever know" because
it's supposed to be "completely invisible" with "absolutely no
trace."
Security
experts say it's no internet hoax.
"It's
real, and it is pretty creepy," said Rick Mislan,
a former military intelligence officer who now teaches cyber forensics at
Mislan
has examined thousands of cell phones inside Purdue's Cyber Forensics Lab, and
he says spy software can now make even the most high-tech cell phone
vulnerable.
For much more from WTHR about what
stalkers can do to your cell phone, just check out this amazing video. It is one of the best
news reports that I have ever seen.
Are you starting to see how your cell
phone makes you a prisoner of a digital world?
The police can listen to you and
track you any time that they want to.
The federal government can listen to
you and track you any time that they want to.
Big corporations can buy all of the
personal information that cell phones gather any time that they want to from
certain cell phone companies.
Stalkers can listen to you and track
you 24 hours a day if they are able to hack in to your cell phone somehow.
If you own a cell phone and you still
want to have some privacy, then you need to take the battery completely out of
the cell phone when you are not using it.
Our world is becoming a much less private place, and we all
need to be mindful of the changes that are happening.
Unfortunately, as our world becomes
even more interconnected and even more dependent on technology, the amount of
privacy we all have is likely to continue to decrease. A digital Big
Brother control grid is being constructed all around us, and in the future that
control grid could potentially be used for very malevolent purposes.
So let us be as wise as serpents and
innocent as doves. Our world is changing, and not for the better.
