Internet and Phone Tracking 101

How do I know if I’m being tracked online?

If you’re on the Internet or you have a cell phone, you are being tracked and analyzed. Websites like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Buzzfeed, College Humor, Dictionary.com, SparkNotes . . .  (pretty much every website you visit) make 90-95% of their money from advertising.  To advertise better, they want to know more about you.  To do that, they track everything we do on the Internet.

How do they track us? The most common way is through using something called a "tracking cookie." It sounds silly, I know. A "cookie" is a small piece of computer code that is placed inside your browser's memory every time you go to a site (on a computer or tablet or on a phone, too).

A tracking cookie looks something like this:

That's it. That little sequence of symbols and numbers allows the webpage (msn.com in this case) to follow me around the web. MSN can then keep track of every link I click on (they call that a "clickstream"). There are other tracking tricks that use "flash beacons" and other techno sounding things, but for simplicity, we can just call them all "tracking cookies."Here’s an example using a computer web browser.  Using an addon called “Ghostery" it's possible to see and block attempts to track me.  If I go to the Dictionary.com website with Ghostery enabled, I can see that 11 ad networks and data gathering sites are going to be tracking my movements after I leave Dictionary.com. Or at least they would be if I didn't have Ghostery and a few other things installed.  

To read more on Internet tracking, click past the break:

Why are websites tracking me on the Internet?There's an important premise to the Internet that companies take as fact and Internet users hardly ever think of. To a web site like Dictionary.com, you are not the customer; you are the product. What do you produce? Data. Lots and lots of data about your interests.Companies want to be able to track your movements to send you advertisements that are aimed at your interests or, even better, to learn about and sell information about your interests to other companies. The practice of gathering this information and selling it even has a name. It's called "Big Data."
.





Why do I care if they know i’m visiting that one site?  It’s no big deal, right?

There lies the biggest problem.  It’s not just one site.  Most if not all of those 11 trackers that “Ghostery” blocked have the ability to follow your browsing from there to every website you visit after that.  And they don’t go away.  When you close the browser or turn off the computer, the trackers wait there for you to come back and then continue sending your browsing info back to their makers.

But the Internet’s big right?  I’m just one small part of it.

That is true, but computing power has evolved to the point that we humans have a hard time even comprehending how massive it is.

Watson-the Jeopardy winning computer

 
Remember IBM’s computer Watson that beat the best human Jeopardy champions at their own game?  If not, here’s a short video sample.

A smaller and slower version of Watson is being put to use at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.  It will be “reading” cancer research and analyzing it to help oncologists sort through the massive amounts of data in their field.  That smaller, slower Watson can “read” 200 million pages in three seconds.  

3 seconds.

200 million pages.

And that’s in 2012.  The generally accepted rule is that computing power and speed doubles every 18 months.  It’s called Moore’s Law, and if anything tech companies are beating Moore's Law..

Here’s a computer from the 1960’s. All of that stuff in the room is one computer, and this is the technology that was used to land men on the moon

.

That was roughly 50 years ago.  Now the chip in a $20 cell phone you buy at Walmart can make that computer cry for its mommy.

So if computers like Watson can process 200 million pages in 3 seconds in 2012 and computing power doubles every 18 months, what might computers be able to do 50 years from now?

Right now there are about 2.2 billion people online in the entire world.  So that would take Watson what?  30 minutes to check up on every one of them?  

What about my cell phone?  Didn’t you mention that?

The answer is the same and a lot worse.  If you have a cell phone, someone always knows where you are.  If you have a smartphone, someone always knows what you are doing on it AND where you are.  See this article for more.  

But what’s even better about cell phones--from an advertiser’s perspective--is that they are NOT even a little bit anonymous.  You are specifically, directly identified by your phone's ID number and companies can follow exactly what you do. Verizon even has what people are calling a "perma-cookie" that they attach to every bit of data that their phones send out to the web.

So, yes, Apple (or Google) and Verizon (and Sprint and AT&T, etc.) does know about the time that you looked at that website, and they then sell that information to big data companies for big bucks.