Somebody’s Watching Me and You!

January, 2008

I've become hyper-cautious with Internet click-through ads. Unless I know the website to where I am being pointed, I just say no. Back in ’00 I pulled a team out of a web development contract because of the lengths a Dutch group was going to to mine and then turn around and sell visitor data as if it were their birthright. It felt creepy then and the technology was far more primitive than today's.

The privacy cost of surfing the web is becoming very high indeed. Nearly all websites immediately download some form of recognition software or "cookies" to your computer. If you go into your browser’s cookies list you see hundreds of them if you surf a lot of sites. Most are the recognisable sites you visit. And somewhere on the list appear names controlled by big ad company cookies. These are the ones that scare me because of their size and ability to share and mine my viewing behaviour on the Web.

Double Click - now owned by Google after rebuffing overtures from Microsoft their own scuttled merger talks with Yahoo! show that very large players are in this game and everyone wants to own both the search and advertising business sides of the Web. BT Broadband uses Yahoo! and I often think of changing to a more obscure ISP but the hassle of changing e-mail address accounts holds me back. They know this hassle will keep me in inertia.

Now cookies are mostly benign. They were initially designed to make return visits load easier on your machine and were created long before ADSL and cable. Since nearly all of us have abandoned 28.8 dial-up modems and now have 300, 700 or more bps from ADSL or cable providers, they've mostly outlived that functional utility. It’s one of those things no one bothered to fix (like keeping the NumLock key on after you boot your machine).

Then someone realised these cookies could work both ways and they became tracking cookies, little streaming snitches (for lack of a better word) that send your web viewing history into databases to be statistically mined. If you’ve ever noticed the little transmission icon between your machine and the ISP sending data when you have not yourself pressed send me a new page or received data, there's a good chance it is a microburst from a tracking cookie going off into some database.

It's getting out of hand though and is partly how an advertiser can tell your Internet Service Provider, computer type, operating system, processor and connection speed, whether or not you live in an affluent neigbourhood and then from these data profiles they get a scarily good guess of whether or not you are male or female, approximate age demographic, and it just keeps burrowing or mining data down until it finds a profile match for you, then retrieves a targeted advert and pops it on your screen and… it all happens in about a 1/billionth of a second.

This is the dirty little secret of the Web and whilst most protest a bit too much in their privacy policy statements... really, at the end of the day, who knows where this info goes, FBI, MI-6?

While the cookies are harmless to our computers, I'm getting tired of everyone gathering data on me and knowing where I go next on the Web. The "download these cute smiley icons" and flashing "you have won a free _______!" sites are the worst! (btw it was this type of company we pulled our contact from with along with their assorted sisters, cousins and aunts who accompany them wherever they go...).

My computer guy found both a nasty Trojan horse virus and after deleting/repairing it, it hid a browser hijack worm (the nastiest of tracking devils that can allow someone to manipulate your data from anywhere.) Now to their credit, Microsoft and others work very hard to the fix holes allowing these in and if they spent less time on marketing and more time on actually building a decent Operating system, but that’s a rant for another time…

The free programs: Adaware SE and SpyBot daily flushes them out and repairs them. Some of these though have longer half-lives than Uranium-235. Visit a website, they're baaaack.

Even fairly reputable and longer term players in the ad biz create things so insidious they where your cursor pauses on a page and for how long. In theory, this tells them your ad viewing time and the technology in this area is just becoming downright spooky. What's next? Micro-implant cameras on my screen to check my REM eye speed and subconscious behaviour/thoughts?

It's a bit too creepily 1984 for me and is it really the price I must pay to visit the Web?

As appeared on TBD.com