by Dave Moore, 9-16-18
Imagine if, as soon as you entered your favorite big box store to do some shopping, a small drone robot started flying around your head, following you everywhere you went.
Up and down every aisle, around every corner, its tiny cameras zooming in and out, the drone watched your every move as you walked around the store. Everything you looked at, everything you selected to buy was closely observed and noted.
As soon as you touched your first selection, more drones appeared and joined in the surveillance, zooming in on your face, studying your eyes, observing your breathing and calculating your heart rate, trying to guess what you were thinking. How long you looked at every item was scrutinized and the swarm of tiny flying robots used artificial intelligence algorithms to predict what your next purchase might be. Soon, scores of drones were paying attention to you, trying to figure you out.
As if that were not strange enough, the drones even followed you out of the store when you left, tracking you and your car’s every movement, analyzing the cell phone calls you made on the way, and adding the additional information to your profile that was being updated multiple times per second.
If you weren’t careful to close the door quickly enough, some of the drones even followed you into your home, and the surveillance continued. Those who couldn’t make it inside swarmed around the house, peeking in the windows, reading the mail outside in the mailbox, listening with super-sensitive microphones and looking through your walls with Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) thermal imaging cameras and Through-the-Wall Sensors (TTWS).
Sadly, unbeknownst to you in the beginning, explicit permission was granted for all these activities to take place when you signed your credit card agreement, and never bothered to read all the pesky fine print.
Sound creepy? Well, it is creepy, but not as creepy as what happens to us when we visit websites on the Internet. All of the creepiness I’ve described, and much, much more happens with every click, but we usually don’t give it a second thought. Why? Because we don’t actually see the flying robots with our eyes, hear the incessant buzzing of their motors with our ears, or notice how many of them there are. The robots are called “Tracking Cookies,” little surveillance files secretly invading our devices and reporting everything about us to our new Overlords.
Even creepier still is the massive scale and speed at which Internet tracking cookies permeate and embed themselves in our lives. It’s not just you that’s being exploited and profiled, though, but also your friends, neighbors, enemies, relatives, children, acquaintances, and even, I would venture to say, the family dogs and cats. Even beyond that level of creepy is how our tracking cookie-compiled profiles are used to determine who we really are, what we will be allowed to do in modern society, and how many pounds of flesh each of us will be required to produce.
Is it too late? Is all hope lost? Have we been assimilated, and all resistance is futile? The European Union (EU) doesn’t seem to think so; they recently enacted much stricter privacy rules than we have in the U.S., rules governing what private information about us can and cannot be collected, bought and sold, and the permissions that must be granted before Internet tracking cookies go to work. That’s why, in the pursuit of EU profits, almost all websites are now displaying hurriedly cobbled together notices begging us to give permission to their evil tracking cookies. Suggestion: stop clicking “Yes.” Start clicking “No.”
The specific merits of what the EU has done aside, know that here in The States, where we have, in the immortal words of Will Rogers, “the best Congress money can buy,” there are literally no protections against the massive plundering of our lives by Internet tracking cookies forced on us by greedy business and government invaders. There are noble privacy champions working to remedy the situation, but, while the wheels of progress do indeed grind finely, it is also painfully true that they grind very slowly.
Meanwhile, as our future freedoms and privacy are being debated, is there anything we can do to protect ourselves? The answer is “absolutely, yes!” That will be the subject of next week’s column, titled, “Fight the Internet tracking cookies and win,” where we will examine privacy browsers and plugins that can help set this ship aright.
Dave Moore has been fixing computers since 1984. As founder of the Internet Safety Group, he also teaches Internet safety workshops for public and private organizations. He can be reached at 405-919-9901 or www.internetsafetygroup.com