A series of tweets from Robert G. Reeve (username RobertGReeve). Tweets read:
Iām back from a week at my momās house and now Iām getting ads for her toothpaste brand, the brand Iāve been putting in my mouth for a week. We never talked about this brand or googled it or anything like that.
As a privacy tech worker let me explain why this is happening. (thread emoji)
First of all, your social media apps are not listening to you. This is a conspiracy theory. Itās been debunked over and over again.
But frankly they donāt nee to because everything else you give them unthinkingly is is way cheaper and way more powerful.
Your apps collect a ton of data from your phone. Your unique device ID. Your location. Your demographics. We know this.
Data aggregators pay to pull in data from EVERYWHERE. When I use my discount card at the grocery story? Every purchase? Thatās a dataset for sale.
They can match my Harris Teeter purchase to my twitter account because I gave both those companies my email address and phone number and I agreed to all that data-sharing when I accepted those terms of service and the privacy policy.
Hereās where eit gets truly nuts, though.
If my phone is regularly in the same GPS location as another phone, they take note of that. They start reconstructing the web of people Iām in regular contact with.
The advertisers can cross-reference my interests and browsing history and purchase history to those around me. It starts to show ME different ads based on the people AROUND me.
Family. Friends. Coworkers.
It will see me ads for things I DONāT Want, but I knows that someone Iām in regular contact with might want.
To subliminally get me to start a conversation about, I donāt know, fucking toothpaste.
It never needed to listen to me for this. Itās just comparing aggregated metadata.
So. They know my momās toothpaste. The know I was at my momās. They know my Twitter. Now I get Twitter ads for momās toothpaste.
Your data isnāt just about you. Itās about how it can be used against every person you know, and people you donāt. To shape behaviour unconsciously.
Appleās latest updates block appās tracking and Facebook is MAD. Theyāre BEGGING you to just press accept and go back to business as usual.
Block the fuck of of every appās ads. Itās not about you:your data shapes the Internet.
Apart from clicking ādo not acceptā, what else can you do about it?
Firstly, Iām going to plug Firefox as the only non-Chrome based Browser out there. Chrome is made by Google/Alphabet and Alphabet is an advertising company. Most, if not all, big tech companies are.
Then Iām going to plug some plugins. If you donāt know what plugins are, now is a great time to learn! Theyāre small pieces of extra software that run on top of (plug in to) an existing app. Theyāre also called extensions (because they extend the appās functionality).
Hereās what I use to keep my data mine:
An HTTPS connection means the website youāre visiting hasnāt been modified before it loaded and that any data you submit to that website canāt be seen by anyone else. HTTPS Everywhere is an extension/plugin made by the nonprofit group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and it automatically loads websites over HTTPS wherever thatās an option.
(nb: Firefox enables this by default in Private Browsing mode and has an option to force HTTPS connections in regular mode in its Privacy and Security menu)
Another EFF extension, Privacy Badger blocks invisible third-party trackers on websites. It looks at all the components of a web page, learns which ones track you across the internet, then stops them from loading.
Notably, it only blocks ads that donāt respect Do Not Follow headers, which is an option you can (and, imo, should) enable in Firefoxās settings.
Privacy Possum was written by one of the developers who worked on Privacy Badger, and has some extra features, but - because tracking companies have infinitely more resources and political power than nonprofits or individual app developers - it emphasises costing tracking companies money over user protection.
Privacy Possumās main feature over Badger is ādata poisoningā - it does background searches for random things to introduce junk data into your advertising profile.
Ad blockers do exactly what youād expect from the name: they block ads from loading. Since the tracking software is often built into the ad itself that means they also block the tracking code.
Be careful with impersonators: there are a number of untrustworthy extensions that use a similar name in the hope youāre not fully paying attention. Fortunately, once itās installed, you can just leave it to work in the background.
Links are another way to track your movement across the Internet. You know how sometimes links look way longer than they ought to? Some of that might be data that tells the website where you came from (eg: email vs Facebook). ClearURLs removes that extra bumpf.
Multi-Account Containers, wich come as standard in Firefox, help to isolate your browsing activity. You can have one container for work tabs, and another for online banking, another for social media - and nothing in any of those tables will be able to track anything in any other. You can also have multiple accounts for the same website open in different containers, so you donāt need to log in and out all the time, and you can put known arsehole sites like Facebook or Twitter in a container, so it canāt follow you around.
