The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published an extensive study of the hidden techniques and methods used by online service providers to collect and monitor our personal information and activities.
Last Monday, as shoppers looted online stores over Cyber Monday, the EFF released "Behind the One-Way Mirror, ”Which describes the supervisory methods used by companies in the background.
The paper discloses too many monitoring methods, such as fingerprinting, the invisible pixel images, the social widgets, the mobile devices tracking, and facial recognition used by the big tech companies Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, as well as countless "brokers" of data, about "who we are, what we like, where we go and who our friends are".
Third-party tracking is usually invisible with nude eye. Code, images and plugins can contain features that track browsing, activities, purchases, visit duration, ad engagement, and clicks can connect different data sources to create a comprehensive profile of the digital your self.
According to the EFF, for example Facebook uses invisible "conversion pixels" to collect data from third-party websites and to track advertising effectiveness. Google uses location information to track user visits to regular stores and uses invisible pixel images for tracking. The smart home Appliances, such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, collect audio data.
The unique identifiers are the elements that can link our visits to the Internet. With tracking codes, cookies, MAC addresses, usernames, phone numbers, IP addresses or device identifiers, monitoring and detection is a game in the wrong hands.
But the slow accumulation of our data by major technology companies is a cause for serious concern.
"These little points can be combined to form an extremely revealing whole," the EFF said.
"The Trackers collect data from clicks, impressions, taps and cursor movement. They create behavioral profiles that can reveal political beliefs, religion, sexual identity and activity, race and nationality, level of education, income, shopping habits, health status and more. ”
The paper reports that Google is collecting data on more than 80 percent of web traffic. OR advertising is undoubtedly the dominant force behind data collection.
In the corporate sphere, data is valuable and companies dominating the field can leverage information to spread it even further.
"Monopolistic or near-monopoly firms can use their market power to create networks tracking, to track and surpass their smaller competitors. They can exploit consumers' privacy for their own financial advantage," the EFF states.
The apocalyptic paper also describes the ways in which this can be achieved. The first common method (used extensively by Google and Facebook) is to "push" publishers to install tracking codes, to be able to attract more traffic to businesses their.
"Google, Facebook and Amazon operate as third-party ad networks that jointly control two-thirds of the market," the paper said. "This means that publishers who want to monetize their content have a hard time avoiding the ad tracking code of the big tech companies."
Broad surveillance is the privilege of a few companies, which is not conducive to competition, especially when collecting very personal data.
"Privacy is often framed as a matter of personal responsibility, but a huge part of the data circulated is collected illegally, secretly and with impunity. "
