As you navigate to Internet, information about you is collected. Web tracking isn't 100% bad—personal data can make your browsing more efficient, cookies can help your favorite websites keep working. But, says o 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 don't know why, but I am constantly amazed 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 given time more than 30% of the world's population can be connected to learn, create and share . And the timeline space που ο καθένας μας ξοδεύει για να τα κάνει όλα αυτά συνεχίζει επίσης να αυξάνεται. Μια πρόσφατη μελέτη έδειξε ότι η νέα γενιά μόνο ξοδεύει πάνω από οκτώ ώρες την ημέρα στο διαδίκτυο. Ως γονιός ενός κοριτσιού ηλικίας εννέα ετών, ο αριθμός αυτός φαίνεται πολύ χαμηλός. (Γέλια)
But, just as the internet has offered the world to each of us, so has each of us to the world. And more and more, the price they are asking us 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 is not. With every click of the mouse and every touch of the screen, 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 history of financial situation, and so on.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting for a minute that sharing data is a bad thing. In fact, when I am aware of the data being shared and I have been explicitly asked for my consent, I want certain websites to understand my habits. It helps them recommend books for me to read or movies for my family to watch or friends to connect with. But when I don't know and haven't been asked, then there's a problem. There's a phenomenon on the internet today called behavioral tracking, and it's huge work.
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 to the program tours that you can install in the Firefox browser that helps you see where your data is going online and who is tracking you. The red dots you see up there are behavioral tracking sites that I haven't logged into, but they are following me. The blue dots are the websites I've actually visited directly. And the gray dots are websites that are also tracking me, but I have no idea who they are. All of these are connected, as you can see, to form an image of me 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 mostly visits children's websites. I'm leaving this, from scared to pissed. I'm no longer a technology pioneer or a privacy prosecutor, now I'm a parent. Imagine in the natural world if someone followed our children with a camera and a laptop and recorded every move. I can tell you that there is not one person in this room who would sit down. We would take action. Maybe it was not good action, but we would take action. (Laughter) We can not sit here either. This is happening today.
Privacy is not one choice, and it shouldn't be the price we accept just to get online. Our voices matter and our actions matter 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.
