Please Rob Me and Other Cookie Mistakes

"Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."
- George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 7

Big Brother is watching you.

While I never considered myself overly paranoid about online security, taking a Digital Marketing course at Columbia this semester has made me all too aware of the personal details that websites scrape, store, and sell. Most users are aware that websites use ‘cookies’ to remember who we are (so you don’t have to re-log in every time you visit a site). But do you realize everything that those cookies are doing? 

Cookies are a huge part of the $31.7B annual Digital Advertising spend strategy by firms because they allow advertisers to target incredibly specific groups of people. While the cookies on your browser don’t include names (supposedly), they do track your specific computer IP address, including your Google searches, website purchases, and other items that allow advertisers to know your age, gender, and location. 

It’s not a coincidence that if you put an item in a website shopping cart, but leave before buying the item, that you might get an email coupon from the retailer soon afterwards for the exact item that you almost purchased. And when was the last time Priceline or Orbitz sent you an email advertising specials for an airport nowhere near you? They remember from your cookies where you have recently searched/traveled, and make their email/ad targets towards you specific. The targeting allows retailers to achieve much higher "conversion" rates than generic email blasts.

Why did Facebook get a $1b valuation? Not because of the social warm fuzzies, but because they literally have all of your personal information – your age, location, sexual preference, dog’s name, everything. Google+ also isn't a coincidence. While Google might simply be interested in helping us all foster friendships (::cough::), they will also reap hundreds of millions in ad benefits once they have access to similar personal data as Facebook.

While in some ways this is handy (I like getting NYC travel emails rather than general country spam), the flip side is understanding that Orbitz knows exactly where you are going. And they are allowed to sell that information to other people if the privacy policy allows (and who really reads the privacy policy fine print, anyway?). Retailers will even throw in targeted ads purposefully among 'normal' adds to keep users from thinking the ads are too targeted, since there is an eventual creepiness factor (as discussed in the NY Times last month) for users when companies obviously know more than they should. In fact, Target recently came under fire for figuring out that a teenage girl was pregnant before her father did.

But what about moments when you want to remain anonymous? Say your coworker is looking on while you Google hard-hitting business research – and the Google display ads all relate to cream for that rash you looked up last week? Or baby ads if you haven’t yet told friends you’re pregnant?

DuckDuckGo is becoming a popular resource. While it will likely never take over Google, the site promises total anonymity and has found a cult following among those searching for privacy.

Sites like PleaseRobMe have popped up to help users understand that combinations of online data could allow criminals to easily steal your stuff (For example, your name and geolocation from FourSquare/Facebook/GoogleBuzz tells burglars that you’re out for dinner, or on vacation in Tahiti, allowing them to find your address from Facebook, and perhaps the fact that you recently 'liked' Blue Nile jewelry and might be loaded).

To better understand the level of detail that companies like Google track, check out DoubleClick Ad Planner. It's a free site from Google intended to help companies plan where to advertise by showing for any domain name the age/income/location/etc of the website's visitors. It also shows "sites also visited," meaning that people who visited the one domain also like going to the other listed sites.

Google Insight is also an interesting one. Another free tool that shows patterns for our search terms. Say you enter "pants, slacks, gifts for him" as search terms (top left of homepage). Google Insight shows interest over time (how many people search those terms by month - note the spike in searches over December and May... Christmas and Father's Day, anyone?), as well as a heat map by region. Click on the United States and you'll see darker states where people more frequently searched for "pants" (northwest US) vs "slacks" (southcentral US) vs "gifts for him" (midwest/central US). Click into states and you'll see search terms by city.

It's naive to think that we can erase our presence from the internet. But by the same token it behooves us to understand just who is watching - and why it makes sense to keep an eye on what you share. Also clean out your cookies every once in awhile (from your browser tools/security window). Cookies lurk indefinitely and track your behavior even if you haven't visited a site in months, so doing a periodic cleaning can help reduce your data sharing.

Happy searching!

Toes over Toronto

In our latest escape from NYC, my husband and I ventured up to Niagara Falls & Toronto over the July 4^th holiday week. Neither of us had visited previously, and NF seemed like one of those “classic Americana” things we needed to cross off of the list. We flew into Buffalo early on the 4^th and made the drive to the Canadian side of the falls. We watched Nik Wallenda cross the falls via high wire a few weeks ago via TV, so it was particularly interesting to now experience the falls in person.

The NF area was – to put it politely – “over-commercialized” (my co-worker prefers the adjective "trashy"). It’s a bit of a shame, as the falls themselves are immense and majestic, but the surrounding area is full of casinos, Ripley’s establishments, and copious amounts of bars/pancake houses. We partook of the classic tourist activities with the Maid of the Mist boatride (cool, but a bit expensive for a 15-min soaking) and the Journey Behind the Falls (uber expensive way to look through a port hole at a gray mist which my husband described as “the backside of water.”)

Nonetheless, we enjoyed seeing the falls, and spent dinner in the rotating dining room of the Skylon Tower to celebrate our fourth anniversary while enjoying the evening fireworks over the falls.

Check out the rainbow on the falls in the below pics!

On the 5^th we spent some time hiking along the Niagara river itself, downstream from the falls in a nearby park. The trail was only 2 or 3 miles, but it was neat to experience the incredible current/rapids of the river while walking through the gorge’s woods.

From there we went on to the Butterfly Conservatory. Again, in our opinion overpriced, but an interesting room full of various butterfly species flying around the open space. 

We left for Toronto, after a brief stop at the Hamilton Botanical Gardens, and arrived in the evening. Toronto is an interesting city. Without the land-locked limitations of NYC, it is considerably more spread out but retains an artsy sub-culture.

We spent three days in Toronto, and highlights of the city included a 4-hour bike tour with Toronto Bicycle Tours. Chris and I were the only ones who had signed up for the tour, so we had a private tour with the guide, Rick, who was excellently informative. The day was crazy hot, but the tour was a great way to see most of Toronto and learn about the city’s varied history. The tour is the one of the most popular Toronto activities on TripAdvisor, and it’s well-deserved!

We also went on the Edge Walk adventure at the CN Tower. The world’s tallest tower, CN stands 1,815 ft tall and allows for views of 100 miles on a clear day.  The Edge Walk experience allows you to walk along the top of the tower’s restaurant… outside! Complete with jumpsuit, harness, and safety lines, we walked the perimeter of the tower on a grate that allowed you to look down. Alllllll the way down. Sweeping panorama views of Toronto and Lake Ontario made the experience unforgettable… though the initial moment where you do “toes over Toronto” (i.e. shimmy your feet to the edge of the grate so your toes are off the grate and hanging over Toronto while you lean over the Edge – relying on your safety line – also definitely get the heartbeat going).

All in all an excellent trip!