Your Electronics are Working for Data Collecting companies, Selling Your Personal Data to the Highest Bidder, and It Should Be Outlawed. -Travis Steber

 Your Electronics are Working for Data Collecting companies, Selling Your Personal Data to the Highest Bidder, and It Should Be Outlawed

“In 2011 Stanford did a study using data participants' cell phones collected and used an algorithm to predict the participant's locations at different times during the day, it was accurate within 20 yards.” - Molitorisz

By Travis Steber

A diagram that shows how someone could have triangulated location data to pinpoint the location data’s owner.

Why Would They Do This?

Cookies. we all get offered or have accepted cookies every day, by dozens of sites every day. Cookies is an interesting term; it really is shorthand for magic cookie that is derived from HTTPs cookie.

Cookies are a great tool when they are used properly, when you log into a website they remind the website of why you were there before. Like keeping your items in your amazon shopping cart.

A cookie is a special type of data packet that your browser creates. It stores data on the account user in a cache within the same user’s personal device.

When you type in “Netflix” into your search bar for the first time, you send a request to Netflix serves for their home page. They process your request and then send back the homepage along with a request to begin generating cookies along with their own cookies for your computer to store.

This is the beginning of a two-way beneficial relationship, between the server and the user. By sharing data they both store on you it creates a better user experience. Meaning you’ll be more likely to visit it again.

Once again, a win-win scenario. When you type in Netflix again it will remember you.

If everyone wins, why are cookies bad?

If cookies only worked in the way I previously described, then yes, cookies would be great. Unfortunately, it’s not the case.

An illustration impling cell phones are watching their users.

Unfortunately, you and the server you’re connecting to aren’t the only ones who enjoy the benefits of your cookies.

Some sites will install third-party persistent cookies, cookies that won’t self-destruct after a set time like normal “session” cookies do. To best explain this, I will be using an excerpt from Dennis Anion’s article, How cookies track you around the web and how to stop them.

 

“Websites today are rarely made up solely of code and content created by the website owner or administrator. Instead, they use resources from other sites to build and add functionality to their web pages. These resources are often useful and even essential for a website to compete. Unfortunately, those same resources are often the biggest perpetrators of online tracking. Some of the most common resources that use tracking cookies include:

o   Advertisements

o   Social media widgets (Like and Share buttons, comments sections, etc)

o   Web analytics

You don’t even need to click on an ad or social media sharing button for a tracking cookie’s information about you to be transmitted back to a server owned by the person or company who created it. As soon as you load the page, the cookie is sent to the server where it originated. If no cookie exists yet, the resource can create one.”

With these third-party cookies now installed in your device, they begin compiling data, because that data is money to be made. Depending on what data they collect primarily advertising agencies will pay for it.

Your information is being sold, and you can’t do much about it.

Some might say that this isn't a horrible thing. After all, what's wrong with having ads show you something that is exactly what you would want? Sounds convent right? you're right, kind of. 

Well, It's not impossible for them to predict your thoughts or what's going on in your life based on what information they have on you from your cookies. 

They have been doing this for a while. even before cookies were as good as they are now, but back In 2012 Target read through some data and predicted that a teenage girl was pregnant, then mailed her a magazine with baby products in it before her parents even found out. 

while all of this is convenient, it is an extreme invasion of your personal privacy.

Who does it the most?

Google. Through being installed on almost every device that everyone uses, it would be foolish of them to not monetize your data for their gain, especially since it's legal to do. According to Review 42, they have had 4.39 billion users. Even if their user’s data only sold for a penny, they would still generate $43,000,000.

A flow chart depicting how personal data, derived from cookies, is bought and sold in real-time.

Furthermore, when you control the whole process of selling the information, you effectively cut out the middleman. Making google even more revenue. In cyphers' article, “Google Says It Doesn't 'Sell' Your Data. Here's How the Company Shares, Monetizes, and Exploits It.,” this gets covered in great depth. For a brief background of how google owns so much, I included an expert from his article below.

“Google controls massive portions of nearly every level of the real-time bidding ecosystem. In 2007 Google purchased DoubleClick, then the largest third-party ad network for the Web. And in 2009 it bought AdMob, the largest ad server for the then-nascent mobile application market. Both AdMob and DoubleClick have blossomed under Google’s ownership, and today they continue to dominate their respective markets. DoubleClick (now folded into Google Marketing Platform) controls over half of the ad exchange market on the Web, and AdMob is far and away the most popular supply-side platform for apps on both iOS and Android.”

What’s being done about it?

The short answer is nothing really.

As data collectors get more creative it's getting harder to stop them. Laws have been made to stop trackers but, laws never apply to criminals.

We should have begun to push for the end of embedded third-party cookies yesterday. 

In 1982 Slover, a Dallas newspaper writer wrote an article on cookies, “Web 'Cookies' at Center of Debate Over Internet Privacy, Security.” He wrote this expressing concern for the future and how safe the internet will be to use. Meaning that cookies have been a concern of the public for 40 years now, with almost nothing done to control the rampant data market.

Gone are the days of downloading a virus, it's already installed before you click the link. For 40 years we've allowed this to continue.

Do you not see the issue with this?

Third-party cookies live in your devices, just like parasites.

Why in the world do we as the population allow for the continuation of our data being sold?