Staying Safe online and on Wattpad

Layer #6 Who's tracking you?

Let's recap.

I've explained how everything we do on the internet is tracked by someone or other. It had always been so – even before the internet – but in the 21st century online tracking is now evolving into the greatest form of espionage the human race has ever used against itself. It became an organised snoopfest because of greed – where advertisers were willing to pay the data collectors big money to supply them with names, addresses, phone numbers, etc, of millions of people they could milk as potential customers.

Internet Service Providers soon logged every address we visited, which they handed over to the security services if they were served with a warrant, but also leaked online (AOL) or developed sophisticated tracking headers that were injected into users' browsers (Verizon).

Search engines soon took things a step further and started recording and collating every search we made and tied it to our device, IP address, name, address, etc. They then compiled this information, which they profited from by selling it to advertisers, and later, anybody. True, official bodies were created to appear to regulate this data collection, but as they were set up by the advertisers themselves and were self-regulated instead of being checked by an independent watchdog with powers, they were just toothless institutions.

Next, big corporations developing social media websites like MySpace and Facebook began to realise the millions of users using their services were potential golden sheep they could easily fleece. Valuable hidden data could be unlocked, recorded and sold on. They designed ingenious ways for us to reveal the most intimate details about ourselves, from encouraging us to click a button if we liked something, to posting pictures of ourselves online and calling it something trendy like a 'selfie', which waived our rights to anonymity and made us fair game for hackers, unscrupulous ad networks and other criminals. Social networking soon turned into social engineering. Experiments were carried out by companies like Facebook who manipulated the data news feeds of over 600,000 users in 2012, without their knowledge or permission, and deliberately sent bad news stories to gauge how it affected their moods. Depressed users then produced negative posts in what the authors of this report called an 'emotional contagion'. It is fairly similar to how the Nazis manipulated their enslaved workforces to achieve more satisfactory outputs.

LINK1 The Facebook Social Engineering Experiment (No trackers before loading J/S)

All this did not go unnoticed by the criminals (hackers) and the security services. Hackers wanted these details to build a database of people to rob or manipulate, while the NSA, MI5 and the other 'five eyes' countries (Australia, Canada and New Zealand) wanted it to build a database of people to spy on or manipulate. What it amounted to was the same thing. Information is power. And money.

Now we have the situation that ANY website with over a hundred thousand users (or less) has the choice to exploit their fans and mine their data, sometimes including very personal stuff, and sell it on without their users' permission or knowledge. They try to cover themselves with 'privacy policies' and 'cookie permissions' but as no one seems to challenge them (except in Europe) most internet users condone this data mining, which is actually data theft in its worst form. It would have been the most secret betrayal of Western freedom if Ed Snowden hadn't blown the whistle on it.