Reading Activity 0403: Do Not Track/ Panick Attack
Do Not Track/ Panick Attack
ACTIVITY 0403
“Core assumption in tech: personalized ads are better for users. Ads exploit your insecurities to manipulate you into buying stuff you don’t need. Who wants their personal insecurities amplified?” – Former Google employee James Damore
“Cookies used to cause cavities only in our teeth.
Now they also cause cavities in our privacy.”
―
“Google tracks their users even though their motto is ‘Don’t be evil.’”
― In Limbo
Like any extraordinary power, surveillance provides temptations for abuse, such as tracking political opponents and journalists.
-Ari Melber
You could go crazy thinking of how unprivate our lives really are - the omnipresent security cameras, the tracking data on our very smart phones, the porous state of our Internet selves, the trail of electronic crumbs we leave every day.
-Susan Orlean
Every few years, the feds and the courts change direction or fail to answer important questions. And every day, the Internet becomes more of a platform for lousy ads, for increasing the power of a few rich companies, and for intrusive tracking. It's too important to leave unprotected.
-Walt Mossberg
After reading Do Not Track I immediately installed Privacy Badger. Other than that it seems like having Duck Duck Go and Ad Blocker...I can't think of anything else to do, Privacy Badger looks like a lifesaver. I think figuring out how to change your IP address, or whatever it is that people do to get onto the dark web is probably the absolute best for privacy but I don't even want to Google that! Also since crypto currancy is like, insane right now, I don't know how I would buy my wish list off the dark web anyway. (Nothing to be worried about, just regular dark web things, LOL)
Did Cookies really come into the world through Netscape in innocence? I wonder. But the fact that deleting Cookies is not helpful because these companies have invented sneakier ways to avoid being deleted that way, called creepily 'supercookies', certainly proves they're not innocent now! The paragraph that most struck me because it actually describes the process of gentrification, and so describing ONLINE gentrification which was most interesting:
"These events are unfolding in the context of seismic shifts in power online. Firstly the open web, where publishers and readers encounter one another freely, is being squeezed by closed platforms - e.g. mobile apps, Facebook - which have become the dominant route to journalism. Advertising income which once went to publishers is now siphoned off by the platforms and adtech intermediaries. Secondly ads have increased both in volume and intrusiveness, propelling the rise of adblocking. Worse still, by allowing third party tracking, publishers have surrendered control over their websites and the exclusivity of the relationship with their readers, The result is a loss of both trust and ultimately income (users can always be targeted more cheaply elsewhere) and the exposure of users’ reading habits and browsing history. This environment can deliver neither sustainable independence for content producers nor privacy for users – there must be a better way." (https://www.eff.org/issues/do-not-track)
and here is a small selection of writings discussing gentrification to compare.
“Over a decade of citywide rezonings, land speculations, and corporate bidding wars for available commercial space has produced a Darwinian habitat where corporate retail proliferates, and where mom-and-pops have become an endangered species.”
― The Creative Destruction of New York City: Engineering the City for the Elite
and
“Since the mirror of gentrification is representation in popular culture, increasingly only the gentrified get their stories told in mass ways. They look in the mirror and think it's a window, believing that corporate support for and inflation of their story is in fact a neutral and accurate picture of the world. If all art, politics, entertainment, relationships, and conversations must maintain that what is constructed and imposed by force is actually natural and neutral, then the gentrified mind is a very fragile parasite.”
― The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination
“There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking. It’s a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like. It’s a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility. Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogenous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.”
― The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination
As for if this article in particular is going to make me modify my internet usage habbits, yes it already has because I have privacy badger. But what about my data? I mean, privacy badger can ensure that I'm not tracked by companies in the name of creating a profile from which to draw for advertisting specific to me etc, but does it stop google from retaining all my data in their desert servers forever until which time it might prove useful? I mean me as in anyone. Particularly anyone who makes trouble for any power sturcture. It is my understanding Google has a record of every key stroke, every search and particularly every single private letter you've ever sent? It knows every website you've been to, essentially it's like having a copy of your secret diary you've kept over the past 25 years, full of damning evidence of your own fallibility, sexulaity, relationships and descriptions of every aspect of your life intimate and public. I read about five years ago that there is no specific information about what they do or how long they keep data, only that they keep four copies of it (??) but that seems to have changed at least in sentiment as I just read about their privacy policies and they had completely changed, claiming total deletion of all data with the closure of your account.
Nothing can protect us from large corporations destroying the world online or in real life (whatever the hell that is). The companies that are tracking us, and essentially commiting a number of very serious crimes such as reading our mail, stalking us, experimenting on us without permission or compensation or our knowledge, harvesting and sharing our data with whoever they choose, they are the same or interrelated with the companies destroying the environment offline. More and more we will find ourselves scrutinized and monitered and controlled. The internet is so important, so crucial at this point in history with Covid, that it will continue to be the space we inhabit as a community, and a very hostile and creepy community it is turning out to be. we are powerless to stop them without completely getting offline and that is off the table for most people. I won't bother going into the multitude of ways that I have managed to build or retain social currency that has thus far helped me in a number of ways. But the point is, I'm staying. I'm just going to start making sure I am protecting my privacy to the extent it is possible.
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