Prying Eyes

“It’s essential to be paranoid.” Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian said it like it is in an interview to The New York Times earlier this year. The context in this case was the revelations from Edward Snowden about governments snooping on the private, virtual lives of their citizens, but it’s a statement that holds for anyone with access to the World Wide Web today.

When it comes to privacy, there’s a huge lack of understanding of the imaginative ways in which our virtual worlds can be manipulated. In two separate incidents last month, enraged users asked Google to “develop a conscience” and Facebook to “show a moral spine.” Facebook users were being used as “lab rats” in a psychological experiment that nobody had signed up for. Only, they had.

When it comes to privacy, there’s a huge lack of understanding of the imaginative ways in which our virtual worlds can be manipulated.

Sitting at the office desk, staring at your computer screen, waiting for the day to finish already, taking a “Who Is Your Twin Celebrity?” quiz might not seem like the worst use of your time. If you think about it, there’s a large number of people wanting to help you identify your inner Harry Potter character or “What piercing suits you best?” So many people with so much free time? All this without an ulterior motive? Unlikely.

The online quiz format has turned into a white-hot property in the personalised virtual spaces of the Internet. Bored, unsuspecting users answer a string of questions about their personal lives, allowing the quiz to access all kinds of data in the process, precisely because you signed up with Facebook, and then agreed to their terms and conditions. “Privacy policies that run into tens of thousands of words allow developers to be very broad with the way in which they can use data provided by the user,” explains Apar Gupta, a Delhi-based lawyer who deals with regulations that govern technology platforms.

So if you’ve put France down as your favourite holiday destination in a quiz that will decipher if you’re, say, an “adrenaline junkie” or not, don’t be surprised if you suddenly start seeing links to “affordable travel packages” for southern Europe everywhere.

The shrinking window to catch the attention of an average Internet user demands that advertisers be relevant. These seemingly random quizzes are useful research tools for advertisers, who often buy the data they collect, in order to make their script more incisive and appealing to their target audience. So if you’ve put France down as your favourite holiday destination in a quiz that will decipher if you’re, say, an “adrenaline junkie” or not, don’t be surprised if you suddenly start seeing links to “affordable travel packages” for southern Europe everywhere.

Though there needs to be “adequate disclosure” about what data is being collected and in what ways it can be used, the term “adequate” is subjective, says Gupta. Google Play Store is a great (and rare) example of a service that does a good job of highlighting the key points of its private policy when you tap the “download” button on the device.

In 2009, RealAge, a test to determine your body’s “health age” suddenly went viral on the Internet in the US. By the company’s own account, about 27 million people had taken the test, each of whom answered more than 100 questions about their lifestyles, habits, financial status and family history. The results were compiled to see if the answers indicated symptoms of any disease, and then sold to drug companies like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline.

In a post-Snowden world, users are much more cautious about having their private data accessible to just about anyone.

When The Guardian broke the story of widespread metadata collection by government intelligence agencies, following the revelations by Edward Snowden, a private intelligence contractor for the NSA, the realisation of how vulnerable users are on the Web began to set in. In a post-Snowden world, users are much more cautious about having their private data accessible to just about anyone. Which also explains the sudden explosion in the number of downloads of browser extensions that promise to protect your privacy by deleting the virtual footprints from your browsing history.

While you are connected to the Internet, packets of information are constantly being transferred back and forth between your device and servers of the websites you visit. Some of the information is stored on the servers so that when you log in to a website again, they recognise you and offer personalised search results on Google, friend recommendations on Facebook and auto-fill your login information. Which is why, for instance, you can start playing Candy Crush from level 245, instead of having to start all over again.

Though the information stored about you on two different websites is largely insulated, tracking scripts can also link your activity across servers.

Though the information stored about you on two different websites is largely insulated, tracking scripts can also link your activity across servers. For example, if you hit the “Like” button after reading an article about Emoji on Mashable, Facebook absorbs that little nugget and starts filling your News Feed with all kinds of hideous smiley-related stuff.

Having the Web tweaked just for you is an inviting prospect, but it comes at a price, not to mention the ghettoisation of the browsing experience. This means making peace with the fact that companies around the world are going to use this data — not only that you watched a video but where you watched it, for how long and whether or not you liked it — in a way that ensures you use their services more, which in turn means that you’ll see more ads, buy more stuff, and inflate their revenue streams.

This realisation has come slowly, but has brought preventive measures with it. Privacy-protecting extensions like Disconnect, AdBlock Plus and Ghostery work as a layer of security that stops your browsing data from being transmitted across servers and even tells you which websites are trying to track your online activities.

Though Ghostery is one of the most recommended tools (with approximately 20 million downloads) to avoid being tracked on the Internet, it also simultaneously helps advertisers improve their tracking code.

Though Ghostery is one of the most recommended tools (with approximately 20 million downloads) to avoid being tracked on the Internet, it also simultaneously helps advertisers improve their tracking code. With an opt-in feature called GhostRank, the extension notes the ads you are blocking, and then sells this information to the advertisers, allowing them to tailor their advertisements to avoid being blocked by users. Genius move? Of course. It puts Ghostery in a beautiful position, allowing its creators to reap benefits from both sides.

As far as data collection goes, there could be far greater consequences. Earlier this year, the National Security Agency’s (NSA) General Counsel Stewart Baker said, “Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need anything else.” A few weeks later, former director of the NSA and CIA General Michael Hayden, declared at a public debate: “We kill people based on metadata.”

Pew Research Centre, one of the most admired think tanks when it comes to technology, has just published Net Threats, the third instalment of a series called Digital Life in 2025. Predictions of the future generally also provide a snapshot of the times we live in, the fears we have, and the very real threats we face. The word “corporation” appears 31 times in the report, only once in a positive context. The report is a result of surveying 1,400 “Internet experts”; among the four major threats they highlighted, one is that “the commercial pressures affecting everything from Internet architecture to the flow of information will endanger the open structure of online life.”

It is a model that promotes universal access via free licensing of products, which runs counter to the interests of big businesses. Expectedly, the Silicon Valley of today has as much time for open-source as San Francisco for free-culture.

Open-source privacy protection programs, which developers keep refining to match the sophistication of tracking scripts are, of course, the best bet to avoid prying eyes on the Internet. In the rapidly monopolising world of tech industry, however, this undercurrent has to face sizeable resistance. It is a model that promotes universal access via free licensing of products, which runs counter to the interests of big businesses. Expectedly, the Silicon Valley of today has as much time for open-source as San Francisco for free-culture.

“The fundamental design principle of the Internet has three elements — subsidiarity, decentralisation and diversity,” says Sunil Abraham, Executive Director of The Centre for Internet & Society. “Decisions should be made at the lowest level, like in a torrent network, which allows open sharing of information.” Centralised networks like Facebook, Abraham believes, are a catastrophe in the making. “If a US court, hypothetically, decides to shut down Facebook for something like financial fraud, 1.2 billion people lose the medium they use to communicate on a daily basis.”

The technology giants are indeed so gigantic that the success of a start-up business is measured by how quickly it is acquired by one of them. New technology built by start-ups is designed to match the requirements of established firms and once acquired, it’s the firm, and not the founder, that has control over its utilisation and application. “Historic trends are that as a communications medium matures, the control trumps the innovation,” Paul Jones, a professor at the University of North Carolina states in Net Threats. We see what he means.

“We have a monopolised industry now,” Abraham says, “and in a monopoly, everyone except for the monopolists suffer.”