As you browse the internet, information about you is collected. Internet monitoring is not 100% bad - personal data can make your browsing more efficient, cookies can help your favorite websites keep working. But, he says Gary kovacs, you have the right to know what data is collected for you and how it affects your online life. Reveals an add-on for Firefox that does exactly that.
Gary Kovacs is her CEO Mozilla Corporation.
See the lecture he gave to TED Talks. The translation into Greek was made by Chryssa Rapessi and edited by Aphrodite Constantinou.
I do not know why, but I am always surprised when I think that two and a half billion of us in the world are connected to each other via the Internet and that at any time more than 30% of the world's population can connect, learn, create and share . And the amount of time each of us spends to do it all continues to grow. A recent study has shown that the new generation only spends over eight hours a day on the internet. As a nine-year-old girl's parent, this figure looks very low. (Laughs)
But just as the internet has offered the world to each of us, it has also offered each of us to the world. And increasingly, the price we're being asked to pay for all this connectivity is our privacy. Today, what many of us want to believe is that the internet is a private space – it's not. With every click of the mouse and every touch of it screens, we are like Hansel and Gretel, leaving crumbs of our personal information wherever we travel in the digital forests. We leave our birthday, our place of residence, our interests and preferences, our relationships, our financial history, and so on.
Do not get me wrong. I do not even hint for a moment that sharing data is bad. In fact, when I know the data they share and I have explicitly asked for my consent, I want some websites to understand my habits. It helps them propose books to read or movies to watch my family or friends with whom I can sign in. But when I do not know and I have not been asked, then there is a problem. There is a phenomenon on the internet today called behavioral monitoring, and it is a great job.
In fact, an entire industry has been created about our monitoring of digital forests and the creation of a profile for each of us. And when all this data is stored, they can do almost whatever they want with them. This is an area today that has very few regulations and even fewer rules. In addition to some of the recent announcements here in the United States and Europe, there is a field of consumer protection that is almost nudity.
Let me expose this lingering industry a little more. The visualization you see forming behind me is called Collusion and is an experimental add-on of theletterτος περιήγησης που μπορείτε να εγκαταστήσετε στο πρόγραμμα περιήγησης Firefox που σας βοηθά να δείτε πού πάνε τα δεδομένα σας στο διαδίκτυο και ποιός σας παρακολουθεί. Οι κόκκινες κουκκίδες που βλέπετε εκεί πάνω είναι ιστοσελίδες παρακολούθησης συμπεριφοράς στις οποίες δεν έχω πλοηθηθεί, αλλά με ακολουθούν. Οι μπλε κουκίδες είναι οι ιστοσελίδες που έχω επισκεφτεί απευθείας στην πραγματικότητα. Και οι γκρι τελείες είναι ιστοσελίδες που επίσης με παρακολουθούν, αλλά δεν έχω καμία ιδέα για το ποιοι είναι. Όλα αυτά είναι συνδεδεμένα, όπως μπορείτε να δείτε, για το σχηματισμό μίας picturemy s on the internet. And this is my profile.
Let me go to an example of something very specific and personal. I installed the Collusion on my laptop two weeks ago and let it follow me on a quite typical day. Now, like most of you, I start my day by going online and checking my emails. Then I go to a news website, and I look at some news headlines. And in this case I liked one of them about the benefits of music education in schools and I shared it in a social network.
Our daughter then came to our table for breakfast, and I asked her, "Is there an emphasis on music education at your school?" And she, of course, as would be natural from a nine-year-old, looked at me and said in astonishment, "What is education?" So I sent it to the internet, of course, to look it up. Let me stop here now. We have not eaten even two bites since breakfast and there are already almost 25 websites that follow me. I had navigated a total of four.
So let me move quickly with the rest of my day. I go to work, check my e-mail, log in to some more social networking sites, write on my blog, watch other news, share some of this news, watch some videos, quite a typical day - in this case, in fact quite a few meticulous - and at the end of the day, as my day ends, I look at my profile. The red dots have exploded. Gray dots have grown exponentially. In total, there are over 150 websites that now track my personal information, most of them without my consent.
I look at this picture and I am horrified. This is nothing. I am being persecuted on the internet. And why is this happening? Quite simple - it's a huge business. The revenues of the largest companies in this field today are over $ 39 billion. And as adults, we are certainly not alone. At the same time I installed my own Collusion profile, I installed one for my daughter. And in a single Saturday morning, with over two hours on the Internet, set her own Collusion profile.
This is a nine-year-old girl who mainly visits children's websites. I walk away from it, from freaked out to pissed off. I'm no longer a tech pioneer or a privacy advocate, I'm now a parent. Imagine in the physical world if someone followed the children us with a camera and a laptop and record their every move. I can tell you that there is not a single person in this room who would sit impassive. We would take action. It might not have been a good action, but we would take action. (Laughter) We can't sit idly by here either. This is happening today.
Privacy is not an option, and it should not be the price we just accept to enter the internet. Our voices matter and our actions even more.
Today we launched the Collusion. You can download it, install it on Firefox to see who watches you online and follow you in the digital forest. Going forward, all our voices must be heard. Because what we do not know can actually hurt us. Because the memory of the internet is everlasting. They are watching us. It is now time for us to observe the observers.
Thanks.
