I have sent the kids in my house logs for their devices from the DNS blocker I have running on our network, but it was too much for them to digest. Perhaps I should work on a visualization tool of all the data that shows impacts of their data leakage and puts it in a video format they can consume. It sounds like a lot of work to build.
I'm an adult who understands tracking tech and in particular Google's level of tracking quite well (I used to work on AdWords), and I'm one of these people -- tracking doesn't seem to negatively impact my quality of life at all but it keeps the many free services I value greatly running.
Visual or audio representations of the amount of data they're collecting are hardly an argument for why it's bad, as the logic goes "see, they're collecting a lot of data about your browsing... ...and that's bad" but it doesn't fill in the logical leap in the middle. You are going to be a lot more persuasive if you can fill that in instead of making fancy graphs.
Most people don't have an understanding about how their browsing is a part of a positive feedback loop that pushes them into echo chambers on Facebook, Youtube, TikTok, etc. It's a consequence of relying on advertising as a revenue generator for these services. Teaching your kids about how their data is being used for this purpose is important. Sending them raw DNS logs to do that is definitely not going to be effective though.
Your data is not worthless, and generally I consider data harvesting harmful because of the nation-state subpoenas it enables.
If I attend a protest for abortion rights, and my geo data is bound to that event and then I seek an abortion in another state, ive now created a wonderful fingerprint that may soon lead to my incaerceration.
(For americans) But the united states is not even the worst perpetrator. Imagine your least favorite government demanding google gives them a list of anyone that might be a political dissident based on audio they have collected.
Data is a liability.
I've read a lot of the "pro privacy/anti tracking" arguments over the years, and (outside of a few exceptions) they almost always hinge upon some aesthetic dislike for companies having this information, rather than having any material justification for why it's harmful.
But attacking ads and ad tracking, the revenue model of the free web, is materially harmful. Imagine how much worse the world would be if Google search weren't free -- even a nominal fee of a few dollars a month would preclude most of the third world from accessing the best index of humanity's collective knowledge (not to mention how much worse the user experience would be to quickly Google something). Humanity collectively would be very non trivially worse off.
Seriously, what other business model besides tracked ads can generate enough revenue to keep the lights on, let alone power growth, at companies providing free services like Google Search, Maps, etc, that don't have such grossly negative externalities like severely curtailing human development and don't offend the aesthetic sensibilities of people who are prima facie annoyed by a company using the interactions with their free service to make money?
You may accept this bargain, but most of us hate it, and are not being offered a competitive market alternative to this version of reality.
But that just means the novel representations are a step forward, just not the whole solution.
Making the invisible visible creates a situation where people can start asking questions about that thing, instead of ignoring or being ignorant of it.
It doesn’t affect me and I like free stuff, so seems fine.
There isn’t a missing logical leap in the middle. The tracking is self-evidently anti-democratic.
"My leash is long enough to reach all the places I care to visit, and the food is good."
Look at China for a glimpse of what will happen when they shorten the leash. But you didn't bother to remove the leash while you still could.
> But that's the State, not Google!
Will it matter? The State will use Google, and Google will use the State.
That said, the biggest tangible negative impact of tracking is that the profiles companies build on you are overly simplistic caricatures that reinforce societal biases. For example, for many complex reasons, women do not apply to executive roles as much as men. Google is thus less likely to show me an ad for an executive role knowing that I’m a woman [0], since statistically, I’m less likely to click it. This further reinforces the societal trend of women applying to executive roles at a lower rate than men.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/07...
It’s nice you’re willing to make this trade, but obviously some of us are not. I value my privacy, and I do not want Google to know what I’m interested in, how old I am, or my gender. I find the fact that Google tries to infer these things about me deeply, deeply creepy.
Google also goes out of their way to collect information you don’t want to share. Turn off “Location history” on your phone, and Google Maps will no longer remember where your “Home” is (or, actually, it will claim it won’t remember, but it will still randomly tell you how long it will take to get home). This is of course nonsense. I can want to tell someone where I live and also not want that same someone to track everywhere I go in minute detail. Google’s position here is kind of like an abusive partner saying if you give them your phone number they obviously have the right to see everything in your phone. All the while claiming “You’re in control!” Soooo creepy!
The more insanely creepy things Google does with my data, the less I trust them. Again, it’s fine if you trust them. You’re free to trust anyone you want (even my abusive ex partner, although I’d caution against it). But some of us don’t trust Google, and we don’t want to move to the opt-out-village[0] so here we are.
[0]: https://www.theonion.com/google-opt-out-feature-lets-users-p...
Like a frog boiling in hot water, just because you don't perceive it, doesn't mean it doesn't affect you. The business model of ad-based services is that they sell the ability to manipulate real world behavior to the highest bidder. That manipulation ranges from innocuous ads for products you don't need, to political ideas and misinformation. There's a chance that you're self aware, self disciplined and very observant and manage to avoid this manipulation. But given the fact that it works extremely well at scale, it's more likely that you're just not noticing how you're being manipulated.
This is all to say I don't think it's "bad" in the way malware is bad or a security breach is bad, but there's a dollar amount attached to these things, and you may be giving a company more money than you're willing to pay.
You don't need continuous pervasive tracking without people's consent to run ads and keep the free service running.
Is that the world we'd like to live in?
Charts and graphs are the only way people not interested in data can even remotely become interested. If it's good enough for FPOTUS, then it should be a compelling enough reason to complete your idea.
The commenters are all people who either (a) care for their own online privacy and/or (b) are actively engaged in profitting from others' disregard for online privacy. There is no one commenting who does not care, obviously.
Certainly, if the people who do not care joined the people who do care, and they each took unilaterla action to protect their privacy, and this was actually effective, then that is one possible path to change. Admittedly, it seems rather far-fetched.
Another path to change is regulation.
For example, when I consider the history of telecommunications, I recall federal regulation to protect customer privacy before the internet despite that there were few people actually had reason to care about the issue let alone took action on it. Many of us have living relatives who can recall the "party lines" they once used. Customers accepted the high probability of eavesdropping.
But eventually judicial decisions and later federal legislation in 1968 gave telecom customers certain privacy protections. It did not matter whether all customers cared about privacy or not. Nor did it require all of them to take action.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-bootlegge...
It took forty years to get from Olmstead to Berger. That is longer then the public www has existed.
The thing is, even good digital hygiene is not enough.
Via CCPA requests, I have learned that every data broker I've queried has a very extensive dossier on my life.
In one instance, a data point could only have one source. A print shop in San Diego that printed up some business cards with a gag job title in 2000-- that gag job title showed up at LexisNexis.
Not sure what negative side effects that could cause though, but i see some positives like using less social media, or learning how to cheat the system in clever ways.
Sneakily use the other kid's device to browse?
found it.
https://www.nersc.gov/news-publications/nersc-news/nersc-cen...
Like, I've been working on a web project that doesn't contain any analytics, but which stores and retrieves JSON data in Google Firebase. I imagine if I opened my website with this tool, I would hear lots of noise.
But, I just can't imagine how Google could do anything useful (to them) with my random JSON blobs.
They're not interested in the blobs, but in the people accessing them. Their whole suite of "free" developer tools (google analytics, google fonts, firebase, ...) are just a means to get information about what people do online.
Is this actually confirmed to be true? It would make a lot of sense for them to use free-tier GA data for profiling for Display ads etc, but has it ever actually been proven?
But if they don't know what the blobs are, how does this help them? What can they tie it to?
The latitude and longitude coordinates of my current location have an sha1 hash of 0950e97d3a2e4839e39ad27deb2e852d498100ae. Is this useful information?
The one and only genuine business reason for Google Fonts is to vacuum visits data from sites that don't have GA installed or by users who have GA blocked. That's it. Free cheese and all that.
This tool shocked me. It exposes in a visceral way just how prevalent Google is, and does a better job getting that idea across than every video, article, post or comment I've consumed on the topic.
I consider myself privacy and security and convenience conscious, not at all paranoid yet as I don't expect I have aroused the interest of a State power (touch wood). I use what most people use and prefer less friction over philosophically and/or ethically pure services. This tool made me shrug. Sure, yea, that's not an unexpected frequency, I guess. I haven't personally seen any disaster come from data shared to be sold or used for advertising. Mostly all I get advertized are things I've already bought (rolls eyes) or things I've said out loud (scowls). The hit rate for something I've been "told" to buy is like 0.001% The last hit was Dan Ariely's IRRATIONAL Game. Pretty cool, no? https://irrationalgame.com/
U=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/berthubert\
/googerteller/main/goog-prefixes.txt
for i in $(wget -qO - $U); do
ip route add unreach $i
done
I prefer it how it is, very simple and effective, also I can actually gauge how much brave vs chrome etc. Obviously browser in my case will be heavier on google calls. But interesting to remember I have google drive floating around which I havent used in years.
sudo tcpdump -i en0 -n -l dst host 8.8.8.8 $(for a in $(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/berthubert/googerteller/main/goog-prefixes.txt); do echo or dst net $a; done) | while read; do tput bel; done
sudo tcpdump -n -l dst net 192.0.2.1/32 $(for a in $(cat goog-prefixes.txt); do echo or dst net $a; done) | xargs -I {} bash -c "tput bel"
I replaced the "teller" program part also with shell script, so that one would give you the clicking without the need to compile:
sudo tcpdump -n -l dst host 8.8.8.8 $(for a in $(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/berthubert/googerteller/main/goog-prefixes.txt); do echo or dst net $a; done) | while read; do paplay /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/dialog-information.oga; done
I always find it amazing when speaker is utilized to 'visualize' occasional events.
I tried going on google and then bam geiger counter mode activated. But i seem to have blocked enough to not have it go off every second.