(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
When you sit down with your morning coffee to read today's news online, it is clear that the news site you are visiting is detecting that your laptop or mobile has connected. At the same moment, several third parties also connect to what you are reading. Some of them are visible on the page and known, such as the Facebook and Twitter sharing buttons, while others remain invisible to you. When visiting the front page of five major Norwegian websites today, the laptop was contacted by closer 100 third party sites, and after surfing around inside Dagbladet.no, contact was made with over 50 third party sites only there.
Big brother who? Who are these companies, and why do they collect information? In order for Ny Tid to find the information in the example above, Firefox was used with the Lightbeam extension installed. The extension creates a list and graphical representation of all third-party websites you connect to, including who leaves cookies in your browser. The answer to the question above is that it is mostly about collecting statistics to target the ads you see. If you are reading an article about garden care, the next thing you may see is an advertisement for a cheap hedge. Over time, these companies can build a very comprehensive profile that makes the ads you see hit the spot. Maybe it's even starting to get a little uncomfortable how well they hit. Basically, these companies should not link the "advertising profile" they build with your name – but with all the information they have, it will not be difficult to identify you. This can be done by linking to your IP address by linking your advertising profile to your Facebook profile, or simply by the advertising profile being so detailed that it alone can identify you with certainty.
Although the purpose of the moment is only to show you accurate advertising, you really have very little control over what happens to the bread crumbs you leave as you browse the web. Especially the largest companies are present on so large parts of the network that one can basically only guess how extensive a profile they have on each of us, and how comprehensive an analysis of this profile will be. Facebook is present on more than one million pages online, Google is 25 percent of the pages on the Internet, and Twitter 20 percent. What do they really know about your online habits, everything you've ever asked Google, how much time you spend on social media, and what sensational articles you click on?
Don't Track. With increasing awareness of the extensive tracking we are all exposed to online, there have also come up with a number of solutions to protect you – some good and some bad. The most well-known of these is probably Do Not Track – an industry standard for online companies that is voluntary to follow. If you open your browser's settings and go to privacy, you'll find a choice: "Ask sites not to track me." There is a widespread misconception that this choice actually stops tracking online. So it doesn't. By selecting this setting, your browser sends out a signal asking it for web pages you visit not to track you. What the website – and the third parties – do, is entirely up to them.
A number of major companies have teamed up to sign a statement declaring they respect requests not to track. There is no reason to distrust them – the problem is that so far there is no consensus on the definition of what it means not to track. A significant proportion of them take a familiar, "Facebook" attitude: They still track you, but stop showing you customized ads. In addition come all the small companies that do not respect the signal at all, and who we also do not know so much about who is behind. So Do Not Track is a low-confidence solution.
Facebook is present on more than one million pages online, Google is 25% and Twitter is 20%
The alternative to Do Not Track is to take the matter into your own hands – first and foremost with the help of various extensions you can install in your browser. But here too it is important to choose wisely. The increased awareness of privacy in recent years has brought a number of quackery to the market with various remedies that do not necessarily do what they promise. Even among those who do, there are various models for how this is done.
Defense against Black Arts. One of the most popular extensions that is freely available on multiple browsers, AdBlock Plus, has been criticized for taking money from the biggest players in the market to pass through what they call "unobtrusive ads". This setting is the default, and you must go into and change the settings yourself to block all creatives. That's what few people do. As ad blocking becomes more and more popular, this policy offers even more benefits to the largest and most powerful companies on the web. Another popular alternative, Ghostery, has been criticized for selling information about blocked ads to advertising companies, so the information can be used to create even more effective advertising.
Another important distinction is whether the software is proprietary – ie owned and controlled by the owner – such as Ghostery, or whether it has open source, such as AdBlock Plus. The latter can test computer-savvy people from all over the world by checking that the code has no major flaws or shortcomings, and that the program actually does what the company says it does – and nothing else. It is also an added security for users who do not have the knowledge to test this themselves.
Among the open-source extensions that block both tracking and ads, we find Disconnect.me and NoScript, among others. The former also offers anonymized searches on Google and other search engines via VPN, and the latter is recommended by Edvard Snowden himself. Another useful tool is Self-Destructing Cookies, which automatically delete cookies you did not request when you close your browser.
However, if you use these extensions, it's important to remember that "Defense Against Black Arts," Snowden's Harry Potter-inspired designation of techniques to protect themselves from surveillance and tracking, is a large and complicated field. It has not been done without escaping the panopticon built around the digital services we use on a daily basis. If you want complete anonymity when surfing the web, you should rather use anonymization tools like Tor.
The big picture. Now that we can all easily install an extension that blocks tracking and ads, can we surf the carefree further on the web? Well, unfortunately, it's not that easy. If you block ads, you'll sooner or later get the following or similar message: "We see that you're blocking ads. We rely on advertising revenue to run the site. Please unblock our page. "
Advertising is not just annoying moments and distractions as we read news and updates about our digital friends' lives. The industry also finances much of the content of the websites we use, and the business model is inexorably transformed into a model where tracking and targeted ads are an integral part of the industry. Are there alternatives? Is the industry willing to return to advertising that is not based on profiles and tracking when this model has become so effective and inexpensive for advertisers? Is it possible to fund web content in other ways? Time will tell, but one thing is certain: When we block tracking, there is a clear signal that we, as citizens and users of the Internet, do not accept the surveillance dystopia we face – and that in the choice between privacy and business, it is the advertising business's new business model that must give way.
Aarseth is a freelance writer and regular contributor to Ny Tid.
tori.aarseth@gmail.com.
