As you browse the web, information about you is being collected. Online tracking isn't 100% bad — personal data can make your browsing experience more efficient, cookies can help your favorite websites keep working. But, says Gary Kovacs, you have a right to know what data is being collected about you and how it affects your online life. He's unveiling a Firefox add-on that does just that.
Gary Kovacs is the CEO of Mozilla Corporation.
Watch his TED Talks. Translated into Greek by Chryssa Rapessi and edited by Aphrodite Constantinou.
I don't know why, but I am constantly surprised when I think that two and a half billion of us in the world are connected to each other via the internet and that, at any given moment, more than 30% of the global population can be connected, to learn, to create and to share. And the amount of time each of us spends doing all this continues to increase as well. A recent study showed that the new generation only spends over eight hours a day on the internet. As a parent of a nine-year-old girl, that number seems very low. (Laughter)
But, just as the internet has offered the world to each one of us, it has also offered each one of us to the world. And more and more, the price they ask us to pay for all this connectivity is our private life. Today, what many of us want to believe is that the internet is a private space – it is not. With every mouse click and every touch of the screen, we are like Hansel and Gretel leaving crumbs of our personal data wherever we travel in the digital forests. We leave our birthdays, our place of residence, our interests and preferences, our relationships, the history of our financial situation, and so on.
Don't misunderstand me. I don't imply even for a minute that sharing data is a bad thing. In fact, when I know the data being shared and I have explicitly been asked for my consent, I want certain websites to understand my habits. They help them suggest books for me to read or movies for my family to watch or friends with whom I can connect. But when I don't know and haven't been asked, then there's a problem. There is a phenomenon on the internet today called behavior tracking, and it's a very big job.
In reality, an entire industry has been created around tracking us in the digital forests and creating a profile for each of us. And when all this data is stored, they can do almost anything they want with it. This is a sector today that has very few regulations and even fewer rules. Apart from some recent announcements here in the United States and Europe, there is a field in consumer protection that is almost completely naked.
Allow me to expose this industry that is lurking a little more. The visualization you see forming behind me is called Collusion (Collusion) and is an experimental browser add-on that you can install in the Firefox browser that helps you see where your data goes on the internet and who is tracking you. The red dots you see up there are behavior-tracking websites that I have not visited, but that follow me. The blue dots are the websites I have visited directly in reality. And the gray dots are websites that also track me, but I have no idea who they are. All of this is connected, as you can see, for the formation of an image of me on the internet. And this is my profile.
Allow me to go to an example of something very specific and personal. I installed Collusion on my laptop two weeks ago and let it follow me on a fairly typical day. Now, like most of you, I start my day by going online and checking my email. Then I go to a news website and look at some headlines. And in this case I happened to like one of them about the benefits of music education in schools and shared it on a social network.
Our daughter then came to our table for breakfast, and I asked her, “Is there an emphasis on musical education at your school?” And she, of course, as would be natural for a nine‑year‑old, looked at me and said, puzzled, “What is education?” So I sent her to the internet, of course, to look it up. Allow me now to stop here. We haven't even had two bites of breakfast and there are already almost 25 websites watching me. I had navigated a total of four.
Allow me then to proceed quickly with the rest of my day. I go to work, check e‑mail, log into a few more social sites, write on my blog, read other news, share some of those news, watch some videos, a fairly typical day–in this case actually quite meticulous– and at the end of the day, as my day ends, I look at my profile. The red dots have exploded. The gray dots have increased exponentially. Overall, there are over 150 sites now tracking my personal data, most of them without my consent.
I look at this picture and cringe. This is nothing. They are stalking me online. And why is this happening? Quite simple — it's a huge business. The revenues of the biggest companies in this field today are over 39 billion dollars. And as adults, we are certainly not alone. At the same time I installed my own Collusion profile, I installed one for my daughter. And in just one Saturday morning, with over two hours on the Internet, here is her Collusion profile.
This is a nine-year-old girl who primarily visits children's websites. I am moving away from this, from horrified to stunned. I am no longer a pioneer in technology or a privacy prosecutor; now I am a parent. Imagine in the real world if someone followed our children with a camera and a laptop and recorded every movement they made. I can tell you there isn’t a single person in this room who would sit indifferent. We would take action. It might not be good action, but we would take action. (Laughter) We also cannot sit indifferent here. This is happening today.
Privacy protection is not a choice, and it should not be the price we simply accept to go online. Our voices matter and our actions even more.
Today we launched Collusion. You can download it, install it on Firefox, to see who is tracking you on the internet and following you in the digital forests. Moving forward, all our voices must be heard. Because what we do not know can actually affect us. Since the memory of the internet is eternal. They are watching us. It is now time for us to watch the observers.
Thank you.
