image credit: digitalmarketingnetwork
Via Instapundit, a reporter at The New York Times did some searches to determine the extent of digital tracking. Farhad Manjoo’s article, “I Visited
47 Sites. Hundreds of Trackers Followed Me,” starts off:
Earlier this year, an editor
working on The Times’s Privacy Project asked me whether I’d be interested in
having all my digital activity tracked, examined in meticulous detail and then
published — you know, for journalism. “Hahaha,” I said, and then I think I made
an “at least buy me dinner first” joke, but it turned out he was serious. What
could I say? I’m new here, I like to help, and, conveniently, I have nothing
whatsoever at all to hide.
Like a colonoscopy, the project
involved some special prep. I had to install a version of the Firefox web
browser that was created by
privacy researchers to monitor how websites track users’ data. For
several days this spring, I lived my life through this Invasive Firefox, which
logged every site I visited, all the advertising tracking servers that were
watching my surfing and all the data they obtained.
Then I uploaded the data to
my colleagues at The Times, who reconstructed my web sessions into the
gloriously invasive picture of my digital life you see here. (The project
brought us all very close; among other things, they could see my physical
location and my passwords, which I’ve since changed.)
What did we find? The big story is
as you’d expect: that everything you do online is logged in obscene detail,
that you have no privacy. And yet, even expecting this, I was bowled over by
the scale and detail of the tracking; even for short stints on the web, when I
logged into Invasive Firefox just to check facts and catch up on the news, the
amount of information collected about my endeavors was staggering.
. . .
The full article is here. (I had no trouble accessing it, although I
understand articles in the NY Times can sometimes disappear behind a paywall if you’ve accessed a
quota of pages.) The takeaway: we have no privacy.
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