"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!
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