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Everyone's trying to track you on the web, and Disconnect is the fix. Disconnect stops ad trackers, social widgets, and other tracking elements before they load, speeding up your web browsing and keeping certain noses out of your web activity. Some of you may be using the similar Ghostery extension, but Disconnect doesn't have quite as much controversy surrounding it, so we recommend it instead.
Over the past six months or so, a huge amount of attention has been paid to government snooping, and the bulk collection and storage of vast amounts of raw data in the name of national security. What most of you don't know, or are just beginning to realize, is that a much greater and more immediate threat to your privacy is coming from thousands of companies you've probably never heard of, in the name of commerce.They're called data brokers, and they are collecting, analyzing and packaging some of our most sensitive personal information and selling it as a commodity...to each other, to advertisers, even the government, often without our direct knowledge. Much of this is the kind of harmless consumer marketing that's been going on for decades. What's changed is the volume and nature of the data being mined from the Internet and our mobile devices, and the growth of a multibillion dollar industry that operates in the shadows with virtually no oversight.Companies and marketing firms have been gathering information about customers and potential customers for years, collecting their names and addresses, tracking credit card purchases, and asking them to fill out questionnaires, so they can offer discounts and send catalogues. But today we are giving up more and more private information online without knowing that it's being harvested and personalized and sold to lots of different people...our likes and dislikes, our closest friends, our bad habits, even your daily movements, both on and offline. Federal Trade Commissioner Julie Brill says we have lost control of our most personal information.No one even knows how many companies there are trafficking in our data. But it's certainly in the thousands, and would include research firms, all sorts of Internet companies, advertisers, retailers and trade associations. The largest data broker is Acxiom, a marketing giant that brags it has, on average, 1,500 pieces of information on more than 200 million Americans.
Google doesn't want you to limit its ability to follow you around the internetBehind our screens, tech companies are racing to extract a price for what we read and watch on the web: our personal informationIn my case, I use blocking software to prevent third-party advertising networks – firms most people don't even realize are watching – from installing "cookies" to monitor my activity elsewhere on the web. Those cookies "watch" as you surf in order to, their designers insist, put more relevant ads in your face.The result of all these cookies – which are essentially the entire "business model of the web" (or great swaths of it) – is legal surveillance. Most people don't know the extent of the tracking, or that they've consented to it all.But when people do know, they quite often want to be free of all this tracking – especially in the wake of the NSA revelations, including the news that government spies piggyback on these corporate cookies to watch people. So the advertising industry just keeps developing new ways to prevent people from preventing them from watching.One way they are doing this is to replace cookies.Google, which runs one of the world's largest web advertising networks, is reportedly looking into a way to create an anonymous ID to follow you everywhere on the web.And this week, ProPublica's Julia Angwin reported on the existence of a web "canvas fingerprinting" system that is almost impossible for the average consumer to block – and the researchers cited by ProPublica ended up dicovering it on sites ranging from WhiteHouse.gov to YouPorn. (Here's a list of sites where researches found the code running, which includes a number of media organizations that ought to know better).
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Device fingerprinting tech: It's not a cookie, but 'cookie' rules applyEU: You can't 'secretly identify or single out users'Website operators that turn to new "device fingerprinting" technologies to track internet users' behaviour in place of "cookies" have to obtain users' consent in accordance with the same EU legal standards that apply to the use of cookies, an EU privacy watchdog has said.Cookies are small text files that store details of internet users' online activity. Website operators often use cookies to record user behaviour for the purpose of analytics or to deliver personalised content to those individuals, whilst advertisers also use cookies to deliver targeted ads based on users' prior interactions online.EU rules require individuals to consent to the placing of cookies on their device by the website operators and advertisers in most circumstances.According to the Working Party's opinion... device fingerprinting can be used to identify internet connected devices and applications, from mobile apps to smart TVs, in-car systems and smart meters, and track their use, it said.Device fingerprints can constitute personal data, meaning that the processing of that information is subject to data protection laws.The Working Party said device fingerprinting technologies can also "operate covertly", compared to the use of cookies which cannot.
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Topic: Disconnect.me (Read 5533 times)
