DuckDuckGo CEO: 'Google and Facebook Are Watching Our Every Move Online. It's Time To Make Them Stop' (cnbc.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report from CNBC, written by Gabriel Weinberg, CEO and founder of DuckDuckGo: You may know that hidden trackers lurk on most websites you visit, soaking up your personal information. What you may not realize, though, is 76 percent of websites now contain hidden Google trackers, and 24 percent have hidden Facebook trackers, according to the Princeton Web Transparency & Accountability Project. The next highest is Twitter with 12 percent. It is likely that Google or Facebook are watching you on many sites you visit, in addition to tracking you when using their products. As a result, these two companies have amassed huge data profiles on each person, which can include your interests, purchases, search, browsing and location history, and much more. They then make your sensitive data profile available for invasive targeted advertising that can follow you around the Internet.
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So how do we move forward from here? Don't be fooled by claims of self-regulation, as any useful long-term reforms of Google and Facebook's data privacy practices fundamentally oppose their core business models: hyper-targeted advertising based on more and more intrusive personal surveillance. Change must come from the outside. Unfortunately, we've seen relatively little from Washington. Congress and federal agencies need to take a fresh look at what can be done to curb these data monopolies. They first need to demand more algorithmic and privacy policy transparency, so people can truly understand the extent of how their personal information is being collected, processed and used by these companies. Only then can informed consent be possible. They also need to legislate that people own their own data, enabling real opt-outs. Finally, they need to restrict how data can be combined including being more aggressive at blocking acquisitions that further consolidate data power, which will pave the way for more competition in digital advertising. Until we see such meaningful changes, consumers should vote with their feet.

Comments

It won't change unless we resist.

[TimothyHollins]

A great way to confound these trackers everywhere is to use an addon like AdNauseam. It will click on everything for you, generating a massive, and false, report regarding your activities.

The only way to make a difference is to hit these giants in the wallet, and once the companies paying for these these personal profiles conclude that they aren't helping their bottom line, the market will have to change in response or lose a lot of potential income.

Re:It won't change unless we resist.

[mohsel]

Conceptually, the user gets paid in services in exchange of personal data and digital tracking.

We give you pictures of cats and idiotic filters of animal ears on top of your picture, you give us the ability to own your digital behavior history. most people who cared enough to find out what the deal was agreed to it and found it to be a great one.

Re:It won't change unless we resist.

[Ol Olsoc]

We give you pictures of cats and idiotic filters of animal ears on top of your picture, you give us the ability to own your digital behavior history. most people who cared enough to find out what the deal was agreed to it and found it to be a great one.

The difference between internet pioneers and the paranoid, and the rest of the world. After we figured out how to monetize the toobz, it was all downhill in that respect.

As for me, my major personal concern is not so much being tracked, it is that the internet is IMO unusable without ad and script blockers. Pages that take forever to load, jump around when they are loading, and go to a new page and do it all over again.

I discover this anew when once a year or so, I have to disable my blockers for one reason or another, then forget to re-enable them. But I discover that error quickly.

I didn't pay for a fast connection just so I can get modem speed loading due to ads and trackers.

Re:It won't change unless we resist.

[Solandri]

When the Cold War ended, the was an apocryphal story that a bunch of spies from the CIA and the KGB got together at a bar for drinks and to swap war stories. The CIA members lamented that due to the Soviet Union's closed society, their job had been so difficult. It was a major production just to get a single operative into the U.S.S.R. And how easy it must have been for the KGB to send agents into the U.S. to take photos of U.S. military assets at will.

The KGB members vehemently disagreed. They said that theirs had been the harder job. That while it was easy to get into the U.S., the free society produced so much information that it was difficult for them to pick out the signal from the noise. Every time the National Enquirer or some local newspaper printed a story about the U.S. government hiding a crashed UFO or someone with psychic powers or a plane invisible to radar, they had to use manpower to investigate if this was a real thing or just made-up BS.

Hiding stuff is hard. Making noise is easy. Why try to tackle the herculean task of trying to make yourself invisible to people spying on you, when you can just create the illusion of dozens of images of yourself, and leave the spies with the herculean task of trying to figure out which one is the real you? I've long advocated that the best way to fight browser tracking isn't to try to hide yourself. It's to pollute the data they're collecting about you. Someone needs to come up with a program or browser extension which when turned on follows random links on each page every few seconds (the extension can learn how long based on your actual browsing patterns), sometimes in new tabs, occasionally closing tabs, and occasionally going to google.com and searching random dictionary words to start the process over again.

Every time you step away from the computer, you can just turn that program on to pollute the data in the profile that Facebook, Google, et al have built up on you.

So how do we move forward from here?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you move forward? Install a blocker and stop them from seeing your movements in the first place.

Install something like HTTP Switchboard or uMatrix, and block the request in the first place. Throw in Ghostery and a script blocker. Make javascript and cookies whitelist only. In my opinion, this should be the default behaviour of web browsers, but since most of the companies who make them are getting ad revenue, that likely won't happen.

In my estimation the average web set will have 5-10 3rd party sites which are nothing but trackers, ads, and analytics. It's none of their fucking business what sites I visit, so my browsers simply don't make requests to them.

Your ad revenue isn't my problem. Your business of tracking people isn't my problem. I haven't consented to the privacy policy of a 3rd party I didn't invite to the party. Your cookie policy? Well, I have one too, and the answer is no.

This won't work for the average web user because it takes time and effort and a willingness to break a website and decide it's not worth using. But until lawmakers clamp down on this, the only solution is to block it yourself and prevent these companies from seeing every site you visit.

Ad companies can suck my balls, because I'm simply going to keep blocking them. And the odd site I find which can't be made to run without the 3rd party crap? Well, there's always the back button and another site.

Re:It's also time to improve DuckDuckGo

[SirGarlon]

Can you elaborate on what was wrong with DuckDuckGo's results? I have been using it for years. Certainly it's very different from Google's results but to me that is a benefit -- I am fundamentally offended by a company trying to control what information I find based on 1) what the unwashed masses seem to want and 2) what Google's predictive analytics have determined is the best approach for their customers to attempt to separate me from my money. If I wanted to consume whatever slop was put in front of me by the corporations, I'd watch TV.

</rant> I know it's hard to characterize what counts as "better" search results, but I really would like to know what the usage model is where Google's results count as "good." Is it that you have a specific question in mind and you want to find an answer? Because my approach is totally different: I have a specific topic in mind and I want to see the range of what has been written about it so I can decide which source is the least stupid, biased, and evil.

I'm just not that worried

[rsilvergun]

about this kind of tracking. I've got bigger fish to fry. I'm in the US, so I'm not guaranteed access to health care. My jobs keep getting offshored and if they can't do that they try to bring in cheap labor to do them (e.g. H1-Bs or whatever your local equivalent is) and I'm staring down the barrel of a massive Automation push that, even if it doesn't take my job, is going to displace so many workers it's going to royally fsck the economy. Then there's climate change and water shortages coming, the absurd cost of college for my kids and not being able to retire when I can't work anymore. Oh yeah, and my country's involved in 8 wars and working on 9 and 10.

When I read stories like this I think about that XKCD comic about the guy with megabit encryption getting hit with a $2 wrench until he gives up his password. There's just much, much easier ways to oppress me than taking away a bit of my privacy so they can sell me crap.