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Interview With Mozilla's Ryan Merkley: Tracking the Trackers
colinneagle writes "Among the eye-opening statements in his recent TED talk, Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs said, 'Privacy is not an option, and it shouldn't be the price we accept for just getting on the Internet. Our voices matter and our actions matter even more.' After you download and install Collusion in Firefox, you can 'see who is tracking you across the Web and following you through the digital woods,' Kovacs stated. 'Going forward, all of our voices need to be heard. Because what we don't know can actually hurt us. Because the memory of the Internet is forever. We are being watched. It's now time for us to watch the watchers.' I've been using Collusion for some time now and it is jaw-dropping to watch all the sites that still stalk us across the web even with DNT and privacy add-ons. The Collusion page states: 'The Ford Foundation is supporting Mozilla to develop the Collusion add-on so it will enable users to not only see who is tracking them across the Web, but also to turn that tracking off when they want to.'"
Collusion Download/Demo. Looks like a pretty nifty tool. And completely without flash!
The Mozilla Foundation reportedly receives ~$300 million annually from Google.
Google is certainly an interested party when it comes to tracking user behavior.
Is this really a good move for Mozilla strategically?
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
"Among the eye-opening statements in his recent TED talk, Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs said, 'Privacy is not an option, and it shouldn't be the price we accept for just getting on the Internet.
Evidently, Gary has never met Mark Zuckerberg.
I'm just a random Tor exit node, up one day, down the next, replaced by another random exit node.
Use the Tor Browser Bundle:
- https://www.torproject.org/
Read the Tor OPSEC article:
- http://cryptome.org/0005/tor-opsec.htm
- https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/01/tor_opsec.html
"HUGE Security Resource" - enjoy a smart selection of Security
Blogs and other security related information
- http://pastebin.com/Cm2ZHuz3
This is nice as a tool to increase users' awareness, but Idon't see the point of using this add-on more than a couple of minutes
Then you install ghostery if not already done, and you forget about trackers...
Okay we know that Google, Facebook and other companies have a tracking system in place. But who's really watching? Is it possible that Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg is reading this post right now and will click his iAmWatchingU app to find out who typed these words? Or is some other sentient entity looking over me like the deity of some theistic religion.
Maybe the greater danger isn't that we are being watched, but that algorithms are now in control of our lives, processing, analyzing, bankrupting us in a way where sometimes the only human intervention is someone clicking OK.
Title says interview with Ryan Merkly, TFS says Gary Kovaks at TED talk. Maybe I'm just new here, but does anyone read anymore?
Merkly quotes Kovaks.
Now I can quote oodaloop quoting samzenpus quoting Merkly quoting Kovaks. You can quote me on that.
http://www.ghostery.com/
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Does anyone know what ever happened to that project for salting the tracking data with false positives? I think it was called "Antiphormlite" and it had gotten up to version 1.3 I think.
I see it talked about on teh google but there doesn't seem to be any place it can be downloaded.
I love the idea of fouling tracking data. It's not enough to "track the trackers". I want to make sure they go away unless they reform themselves.
This is one of those areas where the "free market" is not going to come up with a solution. People say, "I want privacy" and the Free Market says, "Fuck you, pay me."
It's going to take vandalism on a massive scale to fix this one.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Seems like a lot of people are praising Ghostery, which leads me to believe that you haven't heard the backstory.
Evidon, which makes Ghostery, is an advertising company. They were originally named Better Advertising, Inc., but changed their name for obvious PR reasons. Despite the name change, let's be clear on one thing: their goal still is building better advertising, not protecting consumer privacy. Evidon bought Ghostery, an independent privacy tool that had a good reputation. They took a tool that was originally for watching the trackers online, something people saw as a legitimate privacy tool, and users were understandably concerned. The company said they were just using Ghostery for research. Turns out they had relationships with a bunch of ad companies and were compiling data from which sites you visited when you were using Ghostery, what trackers were on those sites, what ads they were, etc., and building a database to monetize.
When confronted about it, they made their tracking opt-in and called it GhostRank, which is how it exists today. They took an open-source type tool, bought it, turned it from something that’s actually protecting people from the ad industry, to something where the users are actually providing data to the advertisers to make it easier to track them. This is a fundamental conflict of interest.
To sum up: Ghostery makes its money from selling supposedly de-indentified user data about sites visited and ads encountered to marketers and advertisers. You get less privacy, they get more money. That's an inverse relationship. Better Advertising/Evidon continually plays up the story that people should just download Ghostery to help them hide from advertisers. Their motivation to promote it, however, isn't for better privacy; it's because they hope that you'll opt in to GhostRank and send you a bunch of information. They named their company Better Advertising for a reason: their incentive is better advertising, not better privacy.