The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published an extensive study on the hidden techniques and methods that online service providers use to collect and track our personal information and activities.
Last Monday, as shoppers were raiding online stores for Cyber Monday, the EFF released “Behind the One-Way Mirror,” which describes the surveillance methods companies use behind the scenes.
The paper reveals a multitude of tracking methods, such as fingerprinting, invisible pixel images, social widgets, mobile tracking, and facial recognition used by major tech companies Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, as well as countless data “brokers,” about “who we are, what we like, where we go, and who our friends are.”
Third-party tracking is usually invisible to the naked eye. Code, images, and plugins can contain functionality that tracks browsing, activities, purchases, visit duration, ad engagement, and clicks, and can connect different data sources to create a comprehensive profile of your digital self.
According to the EFF, for example, Facebook uses invisible “conversion pixels” to collect data from third-party websites and to track the effectiveness of ads. Google uses location information to track users’ visits to physical stores and uses invisible pixel images for tracking. Smart home devices, such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home, collect audio data.
Unique identifiers are the elements that can link our visits across the web. Whether it's tracking codes, cookies, MAC addresses, usernames, phone numbers, IP addresses, or device identifiers, tracking and tracing can play into the wrong hands.
But the slow accumulation of our data by big tech companies is a cause for serious concern.
“These small points can combine to form a highly revealing whole,” the EFF says.
“ Trackers collect data from clicks, impressions, taps, and cursor movement. They build behavioral profiles, which can reveal political beliefs, religion, sexual identity and activity, race and ethnicity, education level, income, shopping habits, health status, and more.”
The paper states that Google collects data on over 80 percent of web traffic. Advertising is arguably the dominant force behind data collection.
In the corporate sphere, data is valuable, and companies that dominate the space can leverage information to expand even further.
“Monopoly or near-monopoly companies can use their market power to create surveillance networks, monitor and outsmart their smaller competitors. They can exploit consumers’ privacy for their own economic advantage,” the EFF says.
The revealing paper also describes the ways in which this can be achieved. The first common method (used heavily by Google and Facebook) is to "press" publishers to install tracking codesso that they can attract more traffic to their businesses.
“Google, Facebook and Amazon operate as third-party ad networks that collectively control two-thirds of the market,” the paper says. “This means that publishers who want to monetize their content have a hard time avoiding the big tech companies’ ad tracking code.”
Widespread surveillance is the privilege of a few companies, which is not conducive to competition, especially when they collect very personal data.
“Privacy is often framed as a matter of personal responsibility, but a huge portion of the data in circulation is collected illegally, secretly, and with impunity.”
