Spy me, please!

Spy me, please is here to help you understand your role in the information economy, and how Google uses your data.

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Lightbeam for Firefox

Lightbeam is a Firefox add-on that uses interactive visualizations to show you the first and third party sites you interact with on the Web.

Found this very intriguing plug-in for Firefox. 

It visualizes the relationships between the sites you visit and the third party sites that are active on those pages. Inspired by the book, The Filter Bubble, Atul Varma created an experimental add-on to visualize browsing behavior and data collection on the Web. It believes that not all tracking is bad. Many services rely on user data to provide relevant content and enhance your online experience. But tracking can happen without the user’s knowledge. And It should be the user who decides when, how and if he/she wants his/her browsing data to be shared. 

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A work in progress. The flowchart of the app. 

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We were discussing on the app prototype.

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Peeping ‘data’ Tom

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The company’s social scientists are hunting for insights about human behavior. What they find could give Facebook new ways to cash in on our data—and remake our view of society.

The future of OUR data

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Spy Me, Please, coming together.

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Stages to the final product

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Search engines are the central actors on the Internet today and Google is the undisputed king of search. Google dominates the Internet,guiding users through an ocean of unrelated data to the information they seek with astonishing precision and speed. It is a powerful tool, evoking ambivalent feelings. On the one hand, we adore Google for its simple, modest-looking interface masking a hypercomplicated algorithm.

Comprehensive study on Google and privacy by Omar Tene.

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In the future, individuals could be able to visit Google's web site and search for a specific time, date, and location. Users will thus be able to witness what happened at any place and to what people, at any moment in Google's recorded history. Such pervasive human monitoring is the essence of the phenomenon this article has termed omniveillance.

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Personal data for sale

NYU ITP graduate student Federico Zannier collected data about himself — online browsing, location, and keystrokes — for his thesis. As he dug into personal data more and looked closer …

We’ve just discovered the same concern and he experimented with his collected data to know what it might be like if individuals profited from their own data. 

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In 2002, artist and professor Hasan Elahi spent six months being interrogated off and on by the FBI as a suspected terrorist. In response to this experience, he created Tracking Transience, a website that makes his every move available to the FBI - and everybody else. In a segment that originally aired in November of 2011, Brooke talks to Elahi about the project.

Very interesting attempt on self-surveillance, quite similar insight with Spy Me Please! yet it focused on user’s location. Curious? head to http://trackingtransience.net/

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Google (GOOGL.O) could be fined up 15 million euros ($18.6 million) if it does not stop violating the privacy of Internet users in the Netherlands, the Dutch data protection agency said on Monday.

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Google's In Trouble Again? Pop The Bubbly

As much of the technology world recoiled last week at the latest evidence that Google is reaching into users’ personal lives for more details it can sell, one small group of companies were celeb

“The Wall Street Journal then revealed that Google had quietly tracked users’ habits online by sidestepping privacy safeguards on Apple’s Safari web browser.”

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Results viewed by Qustodio, from summary page, search acitivity, to screenshot and navigation history. 

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Kidlogger results showed web activities, used applications, screenshots. 

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This is how Google History look like. It captured your search engine keyword, location search, or any activity using Google search engine only. It did not include Youtube, Gmail, or Gdrive activities.

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Surveillance Self-Defense

Tips, Tools and How-tos for Safer Online Communications

A very useful resource on how to stay safe online anywhere without sacrificing access to information. This is a project from the electronic frontier foundation, dedicated to everyone (Journalist, acivitst, students, researchers, etc) who demands safer online access communications.