Day 143: So long, privacy—it was nice knowing you.

I like my privacy. So much so that I use cash wherever I can. I have no desire for anyone but me to have a record of all my financial transactions. Unfortunately, I can see that I'm probably going to lose that privilege within the next 20 years. First of all, I think we're going to see governments start to phase out cash somewhere in that time frame; and secondly, ubiquitous internet connectivity combined with facial-recognition technology is going to merge every security camera everywhere into a single data network that tracks everything you do outside of your home. And this isn't going to just be a tool of governments. Did you know that Google & Facebook already keep profiles on people who have never had Google or Facebook accounts? You see, Google and Facebook aren't really an internet-search-provider and a social-media-platform—those are just free services they provide in order to attract eyeballs and gather data. What they actually are is advertising companies. The biggest in the world. So big—in fact—that they're slowly but surely strangling the life out of everything else in the world that relies on advertising. Television, radio, newspapers and magazines. All of them are trying to survive by abandoning the sinking ship of legacy media and diving into the online space; only to drown in a vast empty sea with insufficient ad-revenue to keep them afloat. Google and Facebook control the eyeballs, they control the data, and thus—they control the advertisers.

How you get tracked online

The internet runs on advertising, so there is enormous pressure to gather as much data on users as possible. When you load a web-page, your browser transmits a bunch of data to the web server, including your operating system, screen-size and colour constraints, what your browser is capable of rendering, etc. This is known as a browser fingerprint. To get some idea of what your browser is telling websites, visit Panopticlick or Am I Unique or Browser-Print and run a test. They don't all check for exactly the same stuff, so visit all three and compare, if you're so inclined.

On top of that, more and more pages now track exactly what you do while you're on them. Every keystroke and mouse movement gets recorded. Did you hover over a link for 6 seconds but not actually click it. They know.

Also, when you visit a site through a Google search, Google tells the site what you searched for in order to get to that page. That's fuckin' creepy in its own right, if you ask me.

Which brings us to cookies. When you "log in" to a website, what's actually happening is that the site is handing your browser an ID card, and then, every time your browser asks the site for something, it flashes this card so that the site knows who you are. This ID card is called a cookie. It's not a bad system, except now, every time you load a web page, it hands you a cookie, whether you're logging into it or not. Not only that, but it also hands you a cookie for every one of its business partners and every advertiser it uses too. As you can imagine, you're browser is probably carrying around hundreds, or thousands of these little buggers, like a dog carries fleas. The interconnectedness of advertising networks makes it possible to track people across websites that seemingly have nothing to do with each other. And as you can imagine, it also gives Google and Facebook a power that borders on omniscience.

Oh, and before I forget, there's also your IP address. It's not really a great way to track people, since addresses can change relatively frequently, but don't think that means it doesn't get recorded along with everything else.

Who cares?

So, what are the implications of living in a world of "big data"? Well, first of all, let's not forget that the job of advertising companies is to sell you shit. And frankly, that's just fuckin' annoying. As far as I'm concerned, the less advertising I have to look at, the better. Apart from that though, here's a few rather disorganised thoughts that I have on the matter:

• Once this data is collected, it's not just going to be used for advertising. Any and every company that can make use of it will be bidding for access, and data brokering is already a multi-million dollar industry. After all, it's financially irresponsible not to milk a revenue stream for every penny you can get.
• Standardised pricing is going to disappear. I was listening to a podcast today in which the tech press were talking about Uber (you know, that company that pretends it's not a taxi service so they can avoid regulation and licensing fees). Apparently, they're going to start leveraging all the data they have on customers in order to start setting prices according to "what they think the individual can afford and would be willing to pay". This is not the first instance I've heard of this.
• Facebook and Google aren't just draining the news media of their revenue, they're actively replacing them. This is bad. You may have heard that recently, Facebook ran an experiment where they intentionally messed with regular punters' news feeds in order to see how it affected the subjects' behaviour. What you may not know, is that a few years ago, Google partnered with Al-Jazeera and the US and Qatari governments to develop a news app for mobile phones that filtered out positive stories about the Syrian govt and negative stories about the Syrian rebels. Neither of these are cases of creating "fake news", so much as they're about deciding what to show and what not to show—effectively lying through omission. 2017 was also the first US presidential election that featured political ads on Facebook which could be specifically tailored to an individual and shown to them at a point in time that they were judged to be most susceptible. Some people are claiming that this was instrumental in Trump's victory. Whatever the case, this is going to be a bigger threat to democracy that Rupert Murdoch … and that's saying something.
• Once this data exists, hackers are going to be doing everything they can to get a hold of it. It's also going to be very tempting for rogue employees to sell on the black market. This is going to be a bonanza for anyone engaged in identity theft or extortion.
• So long as people keep filming themselves naked and having sex, incidents like "The Fappening" are going to happen over and over again.
• I don't want prospective employers, clients, and competitors being able to fish through my entire personal history.
• People get convicted based on the weight of circumstantial evidence all the time. I don't want my GPS co-ordinates, or security camera footage of me being in a certain place on a certain date, or my credit-card history, or my browser history, getting me gaoled for something I didn't do.

What can you do?

Well, when it comes to the real world, sadly, not much. However, when it comes to the online world … sadly, not much. Not much that's practical, anyway. I could say "stop using Facebook and Google", but that can be a pretty big ask for a lot of people. I love Youtube, and hell, this blog is hosted by a subsidiary of Google. Maybe it's more realistic to say "use Facebook and Google as little as possible". For instance, use DuckDuckGo or StartPage for web searches, and get your news from actual news-sites, rather than through your Facebook feed.

You can delete your cookies periodically. If you go into your browser settings, you should be able to set your cookies to delete every time you close your browser. Also, you should be able to turn off "third party cookies". This still let's websites hand you cookies, but stops them from loading you up with cookies from every Tom, Dick, and Harry in their affiliates network. Actually, uBlockO, which I talked about yesterday, might do this by default.

You can use your browser's privacy mode. It has its own—separate—cookie stash, which it empties every time you switch out of it. Or you can go a step further and use a second browser. And if you're willing to go that far, I recommend looking into the Tor Browser, which does everything it can to hide your identity. Personally, I use both the Tor Browser and a stand-alone VPN service; however, I have noticed that a lot of sites now block Tor traffic, and more and more of them are blocking the VPN traffic as well.

Ultimately, if you want to attain any measure of privacy online, you're going to have to layer as many of these practises as you can. And even then, it's probably an exercise in pushing shit uphill. At the end of the day, there's just too much money and power at stake. … And on that cheery note, I think we'll leave it there. Let us know if you have any questions, and I'll see you tomorrow.

As far as metaphors go, I doubt this one even rises to the level of "ham-fisted". You get the idea though.