Free Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert Page A

process unimaginably large volumes of information about each and every one of us, each and every day, and it is then sold back to us as “value-added” products, services, or advertisements for yet more products and services!
    Social networks may seem like secure, even cozy, playgrounds, but they are more like vacuum cleaners that hoover up every click and shared link, every status change, every tag and piece of personal history. As Facebook states frankly in its data-use policy, the company uses “the information we receive to deliver ads and to make them more relevant to you. This includes all of the things you share and do on Facebook, such as the Pages you like or key words from your stories, and the things we infer from your use of Facebook.” Facebook “likes” are translated intocustomized dating and vacation ads; geolocation data is used to advertise local products. Not a single bit or byte is ignored: the companies involved reap what we sow. Freedom in cyberspace is just another word for nothing left unused.
    Many network service companies stress the protections they put in place around customers’ data. They insist that what is“theirs” is “yours” and use “I” and “my” as descriptors of their products and services. In practice, however, they treat our data as proprietary business records that they can retain, manipulate, and repurpose indefinitely. They see our habits (and us) as resources in the same way energy companies see untapped reserves of oil, for one simple reason: the online advertising industry is worth $30 billion annually. Whenever we surf the Internet today, depending on the browser we use and the settings we put in place on that browser, we give away pieces of ourselves.A tracking-awareness project, Collusion, has developed a plug-in for browsers that demonstrates how often such “sharing” takes place, usually without our knowledge. If I were to visit, say, http://www.washingtonpost.com , the Collusion plug-in shows that it shares information about my visit with twenty-one other websites. One of those sites is Scorecardresearch.com , and it sells beacons to participating websites (like washingtonpost.com ), which place a cookie in visitor browsers. Cookies are small bits of text deposited on your browser that act as “unique identifiers” or signatures that give website owners details about visitors to their sites: their browsing histories, locations (based on IP addresses), and so on.
    In 2012, the
Wall Street Journal
conducted a study of one of the “fastest-growing businesses on the Internet” – spying on Internet users. In their look at surveillance technologies that companies use to track consumers, they highlighted fifty of the most popular websites in the U.S., analyzed all the tracking files and programs these websites downloaded onto their test computers, and found that on average each website installed sixty-four tracking files, generally without warning. The website that downloaded the most tracking software was http://www.dictionary.com : 234 files onto the
Wall Street Journal
’s test computer. A Dictionary.com spokesperson said, “Whether it’s one or ten cookies, it doesn’t have any impact on the customer experience, and we disclose that we do it.So what’s the beef?” Users concerned about leaving digital traces of themselves all over the Internet might disagree.
    The small print included with many applications and/or service contracts provides a window into the underlying reality of this market. By agreeing to terms and conditions contained in documents that scroll by on the way to the “I agree” button, users give the companies involved nearly unlimited permission to handle their data. In many cases involving mobile apps, users even give the developers the right to collect whatever images a camera happens to be focusing on, the image itself, as well as the phone’s location. For example, the Facebook app developed by the Google Android