Social is the mantra of the post-web 2.0 Internet. We are bombarded by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Path, Instagram, Pinterest…. New social networks seemingly form daily. A truism about free social networks is that we are the product not the customer. Social websites spy on and track users’ posts, relationships and behaviors because they can sell the harvested information. There are more pernicious uses of this information. We should not forget the communist witch hunts Senator Joseph McCarthy spearheaded in the early 1950s. Imagine what he could do with today’s data.
Google offers lots of great services, many free. I use several of them all the time. I’ll bet you do, too. I understand that the quid pro quo with Google is that they will display ads based upon my use of their services. Google primarily makes its money from selling advertising. In some ways, Larry Page, Google’s founder and CEO, is the Don Draper of the 21st century.
What began as an innocuous advertising-paid, free search service is morphing into a scary all-encompassing data mining company. Google is not alone. Facebook tracks its users when they visit other websites even if they are not signed in to Facebook at the time. Those ubiquitous Facebook Like buttons do much more than you think.
So what can you do if you want to use Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and other social services but minimize their spying on you?
You can use your browser’s private browsing session feature to automatically delete any information saved to your computer, smartphone or tablet during a browsing session. (If you don’t understand what private browsing is and how to access it on your browser, I suggest you use a Google or Bing search to get an answer. Ironic ain’t it?)
That is not the most convenient way to surf the web. There are some alternatives. You want to stop third party bugs from getting onto your computer or to kill them when you close a page, if you need to allow them onto your computer to view the page. Third party tracking bugs are posted to your computer, primarily but not exclusively by advertising servers that put ads on the pages you visit.
Below are a few steps you can take to defeat some of this spying:
• The latest version of Firefox has a configuration setting that will automatically kill third party bugs whenever you close the page.
- Go to about:config in the Firefox address bar.
- Search for cookie.
- Find network.cookie.thirdparty.sessionOnly in the search result list.
- Double click on the item to change its value from false to true.
• You can install the following add-ons in the Firefox and Google Chrome browsers:
Spying is not limited to browsers. Many email companies like Constant Contact, MailChimp or others track whether or not you open the email they send you and probably track much more. Most smartphone apps also provide mechanisms for tracking your behavior. Some of them even upload your whole cellphone’s address book to their servers. So be careful about which newsletters you subscribe to and what information you give to your friends, acquaintances or relatives, and be extra careful about what personal information, yours and your contacts, that you store on your mobile devices.
It would be nice if we were on the cusp of a change in privacy regulation regarding the web. The FTC recently called for “privacy by design” in web sites and applications. Bloggers are heralding their defections from social services, such as this article, I Quit Path. Congress is making noises too.
Yet, it is difficult to believe that Washington will change its ways and ignore corporate lobbying for keeping the status quo. Until it becomes a felony for companies to spy on us I suggest you batten down your personal defenses.
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