How much Information is Too Much Information?

Your guide to Internet Tracking and Privacy!

The violation of privacy has been one of the hottest topics up for debate on the internet for a while now.

With the influence of tech giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon seeping into our daily lives to the extent where these companies know us better than we know ourselves, leaving an online ‘footprint’ too large is a concern for a lot of people.

I mean, nothing is creepier than opening up Facebook in the morning and seeing an ad for a product you probably only dreamt about.

Violation of privacy itself is a larger issue, with serious scandals like OnePlus collecting user data without consent, Aadhar card leak from UIDAI and the Cambridge Analytica scandal occurring in recent times.

In this post, let’s find out more about internet tracking, and check if you really should be concerned about it.

What exactly is Tracking??

Tech entities recording your actions and using them to change the behaviour of their service to you is called tracking.

Using accounts that you are permanently logged in to (such as your Google account on android phones and Apple account on iPhones) and websites running click analytics that record your preferences are some of the ways in which this is done.

How does Tracking Work?

So let’s say you decide to check a smartphone on Amazon.

Amazon realizes that you are interested in this product as you have checked it, and records this information, then gives it over to advertisement serving companies, such as Google’s AdSense.

Next time you search something related to smartphones on Google, the ads that show up will be of the phone that you searched on Amazon, because AdSense now knows you are interested in that device.

Amazon realises that you are interested in this product as you have checked it, and records this information, then gives it over to advertisement serving companies, such as Google’s AdSense.

Similarly Google or Facebook will record your interaction with posts and links to find out what kind of content you are interested in, and will provide ads related to such content when you use their services.

Ugh! That sounds creepy !

Not really.

The chances of a guy working at the NSA sitting in front of a screen watching and recording everything you do is well…nil.

Most of the trackers collect data anonymously and run machine learning algorithms on it to find out what users like what they don’t, to optimise their product. This feedback loop is an essential part of the growth process of most professional applications and makes things better for both the developer and end-user.

I mean, be honest, Google sending a push notification with football scores of your favourite team even though you never asked it to is very convenient.

And so is the automated calculations of travel times when you set off for work, or the weather reports when you leave your house.

When we browse something on Amazon and forget about it later, we know it’ll be displayed at the top of it’s category when we visit it again.

Surprisingly my favourite part of ‘being tracked’ is how music suggestions pop up on various music streaming apps based on the tracks you’ve previously listened to.

So… What are People Terrified of???

Well, if you think about it, such entities knows where you live and where you work, what kind of clothing you like and your favourite food, what kind of books you read and which songs you listen to, who are your friends and the type of people you would associate with, where your sense of humour lies, what you find offensive and what you don’t, what you would like to do in your leisure, things that you would like to buy, your lifestyle, and even the times when you go to sleep and wake up in the morning.

And all of this is being sold or can be sold to advertising companies and other agencies.

In other words, a piece of your identity is being sold to third party applications for their benefit. And it is precisely what has lead to people freaking out.

And every once in a while a company screws up, sending its user base into meltdown.

Facebook user data being harvested to map the mindset of voters during the 2016 US Presidential elections, and the OnePlus scam where they were allegedly collecting data that included non-anonymous personal information are prime examples of this.

Are you telling me…It’s all blurred lines?

Yes.

Ultimately you have to balance the convenience of the internet services you use and how much you like to be tracked.

Most reputable companies like Google and Facebook have privacy policies that they adhere to, and give users multiple notifications when they change something in their policy that could potentially divulge their privacy. They don’t sell too much information to advertisers and have streamlined options to control and manage and even partially delete collected information.

Of course this doesn’t always hold up, which was the case when Cambridge Analytica got hold of private information of millions that they should not have received, so it’s always a good idea to limit the information you put online.

Making your date of birth publicly visible on Facebook won’t be the end of the world, but filling out every field in the ‘About Me’ section which includes your religion, languages spoken, movies you’ve watched, favourite quotes and ideas and more just makes online profiling easier for third-party companies.

Ultimately you have to balance the convenience of the internet services you use and how much you like to be tracked.

A lot of the ‘creepy’ tracking can be eliminated by not visiting dodgy websites and avoiding apps that have limited or negative reviews.

I’d say it’s mandatory to go through the privacy settings of everything you sign up for and turn off anything you don’t need.

Limiting tracking further is personal preference, but it’s useful to be aware of the options you have.

If that’s the case…Whom do we turn to?

I myself run Ghostery, an anti-tracking extension, on all my browsers and along with some sort of Ad-blocker like Adblock Plus.

If you like to take it a step further, you can deactivate Facebook (Go to Reddit if you want the freshest memes) and swap out Google entirely for DuckDuckGo, a search engine whose claim to fame is its zero-tracking policy.

Conclusion

Eliminating tracking entirely is both unnecessary and nearly impossible in the modern world where everything is hooked up to the internet.

But knowing what it is and how it affects you, is as important today as knowing what an Anti-virus was 8 years ago.

Companies like Facebook or Google will always continue to track and sell your information, simply because they offer a plethora of services maintained by thousands of personnel completely for free, and they wouldn’t be doing that if they couldn’t make a profit off of it.

In fact most of the scams and scandals arise not because these companies are some evil corporations that reduce you to a few lines of data input for some algorithm, but because of the ignorance of users and their failure to understand how the internet works (A fact that became very evident in the Zuckerberg testimony )

Thankfully due to various scams and scandals in the past, companies tend to put the privacy of their users on high priority.

While we are far from answering the question of just how much of personal information on the internet is okay, it is easy to maintain a reasonable level of anonymity while still enjoying most of the online services.

Essentially, all it comes down to is the ability to assess your goddamn privacy settings whenever you browse the internet!

Sounds simple enough…right? :P