If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.
– MetaFilter user blue_beetle
John Andrews posted a good article the other day explaining why he believes 2013 will be the “Year of the Proxy“. He uses the term proxy loosely, encompassing everything from a true router proxy to simply using a pseudonym rather than your real name online. He says we’re overdue for a backlash to the incessant invasion (and sale) of our privacy. I hope he’s right.
As the quote above so succinctly illustrates, many online businesses do not charge for their “product”. Well, actually, they do – but the product isn’t what you think it is. The product is your online behaviour, your hobbies, your opinions and interests, the websites you visit, the products you buy online, your age and gender, the city you live in.
Why is that valuable? It makes it easier to figure out what to market to you and how to do it. Ever wondered why some ads follow you everywhere online or how Amazon has an almost psychic ability to recommend products to you? Did you hear the story about how Target figured out a girl was pregnant before she told anyone, just by analyzing her personal data? That’s how they do it – by mining your behaviour, with tracking cookies and the like.
Involuntary Participation
Lots of people (most?) don’t even know this is happening. Sure, it might have been mentioned in 5000 words of legalese you had to scroll through when you signed up for Facebook that they will sell the hell out of your personal information, but even the precious few people who even try to read that barrage of jargon rarely make it to the end, or understand much at all. They just saw “hey, it’s free!” without knowing the implications.
This is even worse with other types of data mining, like tracking cookies. You have visited thousands of websites and most of them have some form of tracking, whether it’s simple analytics or tracking codes for ad networks. This is all done without your knowledge or consent (unless you consider simply visiting a website is “consent”). Many websites have 10 or more tracking scripts. Thankfully you can easily block those scripts by using browser add-ons like DoNotTrackMe.
Disclosure: I myself use Google Analytics on this site and many clients’ sites. I use it to see which city website visitors come from and which pages get the most visitors. It doesn’t collect personal information – the most detail it gives is screen resolution and operating system. DoNotTrack doesn’t block Google Analytics by default because it’s benign and the information is of no value to a third party (because it’s too vague and not linked to any individuals).
Some Privacy, Please?
A browser plugin is generally enough to maintain a good level of privacy. Personally it’s the only thing I use and I find it more than enough for my needs. However, if you want quasi-immunity from prying eyes, you can use a true proxy service like TOR, which bounces your connection through a web of encrypted hosts. That will offer you far more privacy and security than a simple browser plugin.
TOR is so secure that it has an ill-deserved reputation as a haven for child porn. Of course any anonymity service is bound to attract undesirable content, but it’s absurd to discredit the whole system (and desire for privacy) because of a few bad apples.
If You Have Nothing to Hide…
The quest for online privacy tends to come under fire from many sources – either the anti-privacy lobby with their cries of “won’t somebody think of the children?“, to the more pedestrian hand-wringing of marketers angry at losing their tracking data. Both lobbies are very powerful and pose a real thread to internet users’ right to privacy.
The massive backlash to Bill C-30 is a prime example – a bill that would allow warrantless spying was introduced as a means to stop “online predators”. That’s a noble goal, but do we really want police to have unfettered access to our lives anytime they want and without our knowledge? Worse still, the law itself doesn’t actually have anything to do with online predators – it’s a scary name for an unrelated law, intended to deflect criticism of an over-reaching judiciary.
The fight to maintain our right to privacy is ongoing and it will probably never stop. Some opponents may have good intentions but it’s horribly misguided to forfeit all privacy to reach a “solution”, whether it’s to allow others to better sell things to us or to prevent the spread of illicit materials and information.