Showing posts with label Privacy. Show all posts

Privacy amidst Pirates of the Internet Sea


“There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me.”
Philip K. Dick
Phillip Dick was so right when he said these words.

Recently I read a story about a man named Matt in the East Coast of United States who claimed that Facebook somehow figured out his very deep personal secrets even before he shared those with anybody else including his family.  Read the story here. Tracking your personal data and popping up related ads is nothing new. The little cookies left on your computer by websites were used for this purpose. However, what scares me is that this has gone to a completely new level now. It’s no more as simple as deleting the cookies and getting rid of the hack.

What is backing this silent upsurge hunger towards your personal attributes and behavior is a massive technology referred to as “Big Data”. Large corporations with heavy computing muscles - Facebook, Google, Amazon and numerous other faceless ones as well - have built the capabilities of tracking every little aspect of what you do – not only in the virtual world, but also in physical world – and then run complex intelligent algorithms to figure out your deep rooted secrets.

In Matt’s example, he commented twice on an article regarding “Equality in Marriage” on a website that was powered by Facebook Open Graph APIs. The website provided the facility to comment on its articles using Facebook’s infrastructure. As a result Facebook algorithms picked up those comments and presented Matt with those recommendations concluding that Matt was a gay. There are examples where the large retail stores in the US – like Target, Wal-Mart, etc – track your “check outs” and derive a pattern about your preferences, likings and developments in personal life.

There are three very important observations that are very relevant from this example
  • Matt’s behaviour was tracked from a normal website and not directly from Facebook. The website used Facebook APIs and that’s how the comments reached Mr. Zuckerberg
  • The algorithms are now so sophisticated that they can identify very indirect relationships between two not so related things – something a human bran may also miss
  • The data and its analysis is out there with the big giants. Its no more on your own computer like the good old cookies which you could clean up and get rid of them. Matt will never ever be able to erase the impression Facebook has made about him.
Scary? Yeap.

Big Data is here to stay. Pirates of the Internet Sea are equipped with huge engineering muscles. Whether you like it or not, they know enough about you. Is there a way to hide? Well, the only option is to exercise little caution while in the virtual world. Think twice before liking a page, putting a comment and clicking on “plus 1”. Ask yourself whether it is really required? Are you ok if this is made available to everyone in the world? Most importantly to the most genius algorithm written by the best minds in the technology world?  If the answer is “Yes”, you are safe.

Posted by Amol Mategaonkar
Mumbai
23rd March 2013
Originally posted on http://digitalden.tumblr.com
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You are being watched.... by Facebook

Facebook has been the punching bag of the security and privacy advocates for ever. No wonder the movie on facebook, "The Social Effect" has the tag line "When you make 500 million friends, you are bound to make enemies". The biggest criticism for facebook has been that it knows too much about us and there are concerns about security and privacy of this data. Usual response to this criticism is that this is social media and if you are so concerned about privacy, don't share it. I was convinced with this argument until recently when I figured out, there are things which you don't explicitly share, but eventually reach facebook. Here is an example where you need to be aware that facebook is watching you. Many, won't know. I didn't.

Background
Recently, facebook introduced Social Plugins. These are facebook components that any website in the world could embed in their own webpage to provide social networking features through facebook. Examples are - "share on facebook", "like" button, friend list, comments, etc. This requires that the visitor has logged-in to facebook, may be through another browser window or tab. If a website ebmbeds the facebook "like" button on its webpage, the visitors of the website will be able click on "like" button (very similar to you like videos, photos, status messages etc on facebook itslef). This will result into an update on your Wall that you liked that link. This is good. I have no problems with this.
I have a problem with what it does next. Read on.

The Use Case
Follow the steps below.
  1. Login to facebook.
  2. Go to any article on Times Of India. Say this one.
  3. Look at the bottom. You will see this facebook plugin - "Recommend".
  4. If you observe closely, it also tells you if any of your friends have recommended this. In my case it says "Be the first of your friends to recommend this."

What happens in the background?
If you imagine the logic of this, the code snippet from facebook that TOI would have embedded in this page would have sent this info to facebook that amol has visited so and so URL, and in-return asked if anybody from amol's friends recommended this URL? In my case facebook returned none.
The Issue
This is scary. I just happened to be logged in to facebook in some another browser window and without even checking with me, the plugin sent the info to facebook that I visited Times of India - this article. I hate this. I didn't choose to add/enable this plugin to TOI. It did not check with me and peacefully sent the info to facebook that I visited this page. If you don't observe carefully, you would not even see the facebook plugin amidst the clutter on the site. Thankfully facebook didn't put it on my wall , but mind well... it knows that you visited it.
I do share a lot of info on facebook.com through my wall.... my status, photos, videos, links, etc. However, there I do it conciously.... by choice. Here, I never chose to do it. I don'thave option to turn it off either. Forget it, I didn't even know it did all this.
Simple Advise
Log off from facebook after you are done. Don't keep yourself logged in through out the day. Be aware that you are being watched.
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