Tracking The Companies That Track You Online

One of the fastest-growing online businesses is the business of spying on Internet users by using sophisticated software to track movements through the Web, so that the information can be sold to advertisers.
Julia Angwin recently led a team of reporters from The Wall Street Journal in analyzing the tracking software. They discovered that nearly all of the most commonly visited websites gather information in real time about the behavior of online users. The Journal series identified more than 100 tracking companies, data brokers and advertising networks collecting data — which are then sold on a stock market-like exchange to online advertisers.
In a recent conversation with Fresh Air contributor Dave Davies, Angwin explains how consumer surveillance works, how users can disable the tracking software — and how advertisers are continually evolving to keep up with the data they receive. She notes that many Internet users are unaware that their information is being tracked and then traded.
"Most people that we have heard from since writing these stories did not know what was going on," Angwin explains. "So when you go to a website, you're not thinking about the fact that they might have relationships with all different types of monitoring firms, and those firms are installing things that are invisible to you on your computer."
Julia Angwin is senior technology editor of The Wall Street Journal, and author of the book, Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America.

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Interview Highlights

How cookies and beacons work
Based on the Wall Street Journal profile of 26-year-old Ashley Hayes-Beaty and what tracking companies knew about her based on her Internet usage.
"The company tracking Ashley knew all of her favorite movies, her age, her hometown and that she liked quizzes and entertainment news. ... She was given an ID number, which was stored on her computer in something called a cookie. And a cookie is a text file on your computer and really just gives you an ID. And often times when you visit a website, these cookies are installed without you knowing it. So she had an ID number in her cookie. Separately, when she went to some websites they had a different kind of technology called a beacon, which is another invisible kind of tracker that runs some software while you're on a page and tries to figure out what you're doing on that page. So in her case, this beacon was actually seeing her activity around movies in particular — she had listed her favorite movies on a website — and it saw that she was typing those in, and captured that data and stored it in a profile, which is stored at some mother ship where there's a little drawer that has her ID number, and inside the drawer it says, 'These are her favorite movies.' And every time they find more information about her, they add more to the file."
On Dictionary.com, the site with the most trackers installed (among the 50 most-popular websites)
"The one site that installed the most was Dictionary.com. A visit to Dictionary.com resulted in 234 trackers being installed on our test computer, and only 11 of those were installed by Dictionary.com. Some tracking devices are completely innocuous. A cookie, or some type of tracker that remembers your password, [can be innocuous]. So if you ask a website to remember your login, that can be stored on a cookie. There are tracking devices that are useful to you as a Web browser. And those tend to be the ones that are installed by the website that you actually have a relationship with, not the ones that you've never heard of before that are sort of secretly lurking behind the scenes. So on Dictionary.com, the vast majority of the trackers (200 out of 234) were installed by companies that the person visiting the site probably had never heard of."
On privacy concerns
"It's totally fair to say the tracking companies don't know your name, but my feeling is if they know everything else about you, does it matter that they don't know your name? Because it feels intrusive to have somebody know so much about you, particularly when we do so much online. When I look at my record of my browsing history or I look at what pages I look at, it really seems to be a record of my thoughts. Every time I have a thought, I take an action online and Google it. So [online tracking] does build up these incredibly rich dossiers. One question is: Is knowing your name the right definition of anonymity? Right now, that is considered anonymous. If they don't know your name, they're not covered by laws that regulate personally identifiable information. And that's what the Federal Trade Commission is considering — that the definition of personal information should be expanded beyond name and Social Security number. Another thing that [online tracking] raises is sensitive information. So if you're looking at gay websites, then you're labeled as gay in some database somewhere and then you're followed around and sold on some exchange as gay, and you just may not want that to happen. So I feel like there are some categories that we as a society may not want collected: our political affiliation, our diseases, our income levels and many other things."

NPR: Privacy Policy

NPR: Privacy Policy

On how to protect yourself as a consumer
"You can try to play around with your web browser settings to block the type of cookies [that install tracking software], but none of the web browsers have made it particularly easy. Apple Safari, by default, blocks third-party cookies, which is a large part of the tracking but not all of it. Then you can also install additional software that would block this tracking. So there's one [browser add-on] in particular that we recommended called Abine, which will block all the types of tracking that we looked at in our database, which was cookies, flash cookies and beacons. Also, you can go to the websites of all of these tracking companies and ask them not to track you — which is absurd, because you'd have to know who they are. There is a list of all of them on the ad industry's webpage, and you can opt out of all of them at the same time. But one thing to know about tracking is they actually put a tracker on your computer saying don't track me. So you're opting in to being tracked for not being tracked."


Original story can be found here : http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129298003

The snoop in your browser

Everyone and his Big Brother wants to log your browsing habits, the better to build a profile of who you are and how you live your life -- online and off. Search engine companies offer a benefit in return: more relevant search results. The more they know about you, the better they can tailor information to your needs. But you pay a price, whether you know it or not.
A Thought Experiment
Suppose a friendly fellow named Mr. Google turns up at your door. He offers to become your personal assistant, for free. He'll follow you around during waking hours and help you find things. To get to know you better, he'll take notes on where you are (by IP address, wireless access point, etc.), where you plan to go ("flights to Cayman islands," "directions to AA meeting"), what you shop for ("ammunition," "birth control"), what you read ("communist manifesto," "where to hide money"), what you worry about ("symptoms of herpes," "domestic protection order"), and so on. Soon Mr. Google knows a whole lot of your secrets. He stays with you year after year. He keeps his notebooks and files them carefully. And all you have to do is sign a document saying he can share what he knows about you, under vague or undisclosed circumstances, with business partners and government investigators.
Sound good? Read Google's terms of service and its current and coming privacy policies. Think about all the latitude Google gives itself when it says it can mine your information to "develop or improve our services," can share it with "affiliated companies or other trusted businesses," and can hand it over to government or other third parties if Google perceives a risk to "the rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the public." It's not entirely fair to single out Google, since many information companies impose similar legal terms, but Google is the industry leader and invented some of the most intrusive practices.

Babes, Boats and Large-Breasted Men
For a taste of what search engines know about you, check out AOL Stalker. There you'll find every search term entered by 650,000 AOL users during a three month period in 2006. Try a few embarrassing phrases and see who looked for them. I'll keep this clean: Type "nose job." You'll find 131 people who searched that term, not identified by name. Click on one of them -- say, user 2741488. Now you can see everything else Mr. 1488 searched for, including acne cures, "thug radio", "babes and boats," and how to diagnose gynecomastia, which involves the development of abnormally large breasts in men. Mr. 1488 is supposed to be anonymous, but researchers found it was not terribly hard to identify AOL users by putting together clues from their assembled searches.
I'm not saying that search engine companies routinely release this sort of data in public. Actually, the AOL case is startling because it's the first I know of that lets you see in concrete terms how intimate a trail we leave by merely browsing. In this case, one AOL employee made the data set available for research purposes. AOL was hit with lawsuits like this one (PDF) and fired the employee. My point is not that your digital life will ordinarily be available to everybody, but that it is always available to the search engine company itself. And it can be disclosed, without notice to you, under circumstances that the search companies leave deliberately opaque.
Are the search engine companies all the same?
No. There are big differences. Google appears to store your search logs for the longest time (as in, forever). It claims to "anonymize" your identity after 9 months, but the method Google uses actually leaves only 254 possibilities for your identity, among its hundreds of millions of users. Bing anonymizes its logs sooner, within six months, and more thoroughly. Yahoo is still better, scrubbing search logs after 90 days. And Ask.com offers an option, called AskEraser, which promises to remove your identity from its search database "within a matter of hours, except in rare circumstances."
None of that is good enough. Tune in to my next post for a better answer.


Original story can be find here : http://techland.com/2010/09/14/the-snoop-in-your-browser/