Ben Daubney

Who is watching you online?

If you use any part of the internet in any form, you are being watched and tracked. Your behaviour is constantly being monitored in the background, carefully indexed in hundreds if not thousands of databases, and sold to any company willing to pay the right price.

This sounds like a paranoid delusion. But it’s not. This is the state of the internet in 2015, a world where news articles and cat videos are made freely available in exchange for your information. Simple banner adverts used to generate enough revenue to keep websites and services going, but as the number places where adverts can appear has boomed (hello, adverts in mobile games), advertisers are demanding more for their money. They want their adverts to appear only to the right people and to know who those people are, so advertising providers and exchanges routinely collect as much data as possible to make their services more appealing to those advertisers.

You are the product...

And everyone's an ad agency nowadays. Twitter, Facebook, Google - they all host adverts and offer anyone the ability to target messages and just the right audience, targeted using the vast swathes of information collected on every user. What you search for, what websites you visit, where you hover a mouse on that website, what devices you use, what location you're in, where you live, what your credit rating is, how often you look at porn sites, how often you upload a photograph, what subjects you tweet about, who your children are, if you're probably pregnant. Everything is collected, analysed, and up for grabs. 

...and you can be bought

The paranoia only increases at the suggestion of what will happen next. Anyone can buy access to that data. Anyone can display the right message to the right person. Anyone can test what influences a certain demographic and overwhelm that group with a certain message. There is nothing stopping a government, company, political candidate, or anyone else from buying access to data about everyone and customising content - be that text, image, video, or other -  to influence the vast majority of people. Don't think that content would solely be a banner advertisement either - it could be a Facebook post, a news article, a pop up, a tweet. Anything at all.

In short, the more that the big digital companies know about you, the more at risk you are. 

How extensive is this monitoring?

I've known that this happens for some time. The free services that we all use - Google, Twitter, Facebook, the Daily Mail, Buzzfeed, and so forth - have to make money somehow. But I hadn't taken any pulse of this until relatively recently.

A few months, I installed Ghostery on my work PC. It sits next to the website address bar in Chrome and tells me how many times I am being tracked on each website I visit. It gives me the option to deny access from each tracking attempt too.

I thought I'd be tracked anything up to half a dozen times on some particularly bad websites - the owner of the site, a couple of ad exchanges, maybe something related to how the page loads so that it looks on my device.

It turns out that six times was optimistic. 

Over the course of the past three months, I've been astonished multiple times a day by the audacity of how extensive this tracking activity is. Here's a list of commonly-visited sites and, from a fresh load, how many tracking attempts I see in Ghostery:

What does it mean to be tracked?

Looking again at those fifty-eight tracking attempts from TechCrunch, some are pretty benign. Something like 'Media Optimizer (Adobe)' will be something to ensure that the look and feel of the page is appropriate for the device being used during that page load. 'Gravatar' is likely to just call the little avatar pictures from an external service for anyone leaving a comment. 

But look at the others. Google. Twitter (twice). Facebook (three times). A parade of unknown ad exchanges. Most perplexing and scary of all is the appearance of Experian - a credit agency that helps banks decide who to approve loans and credit cards to. 

Each one of these trackers is collecting information on the user. That information will vary but it can be pretty easy to guess what data is being collected. What is next to impossible to guess is how that information is then used. Is Experian collecting user data to help it advertise itself better, or is it collecting it to sell onto financial institutions? 

What can be done?

It would be next to impossible to opt out from all these tracking organisations. In theory, you can apply to each of them and demand that they collect no information about you, but a lot of the data they collect is anonymous until it's collated by someone else - they might find out, for example, that an individual with a particular Samsung Galaxy A3 goes to the Ann Summers website and spends half an hour looking at bras, but it's only when that information is compared to user data from Facebook that it becomes possible to identify who that person is.

It's far more practical to simply block those companies on your devices. Ghostery is excellent, but it assumes that data is only collected through web browsers. That's not so - as internet access through mobile devices becomes more typical than access through a desktop or laptop, data is being collected through a service's app. Trackers can understand you through Buzzfeed's app just as well as they can from Buzzfeed's website.

The easiest way to block as much tracking as possible is by using a VPN, a service that encrypts your activity and hides your identity as much as possible. Over the past week, I've used F-Secure's Freedome solution on my personal laptop and mobile - it's speedy, discrete, simple, and has blocked in excess of ten thousand tracking attempts over the course of five days. I highly recommend it, though other VPN solutions are available.

Of course, if you sign into websites with a Facebook ID or you ask a weather app to get weather for your exact location, then it's inevitable that some of your information will be shared. But that feels like you giving tacit permission to those services to use some of your information for some immediate need, not the sneaky taking of information without your obvious consent. A very big difference.

Do you actually want to be anonymous?

I believe that this widespread data collection is a bad thing, but there's an argument that it could be extremely beneficial. There's the old example of being better able to identify terrorists or sexual predators, but there's the more mundane matters too - if someone's spending a lot of time looking at information about pancreatic cancer, that information could be used by social workers or doctors to talk to that person about if they need further support in any form there. If someone else is demonstrating behaviours consistent with suicidal tendencies, it presents plenty of opportunity for intervention...

...but the data isn't used like that right now. It's used to sell and influence, not to help.

So should you make yourself anonymous right now? I think so, but there's a longer-term concern if you do. Data collection of individuals is obviously very widespread and, before too long, agencies that rely on that data will think it highly unusual if no data can be found about any one person. In my innocence, I don't want data about my habits collected and collated by any number of faceless organisations alongside the data of many others... but in future, might that hurt me? The lack of data is often as telling as a complete data set - it's routine for individuals not on the electoral register in the UK to be denied credit due to a lack of a searchable credit history, for example. If this data does start to be used for purposes other than advertising, opting out could be very dangerous. The fact that Experian are tracking web use suggests that this may not be far away. 

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