August 28, 2018 • 36 mins
How much of your personal information gets collected on the Web? Can you protect your information from prying eyes? And should you?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
how Stuff Works and I love all things tech and
in our last episode, I talked about how web analytics
work in general and why they are important both for
(00:25):
people visiting a website and owners of websites and the
advertisers who support websites and the companies that advertise through
these advertisers. They really help website designers also get a
better understanding of how their users navigate and consume stuff
on their sites and allows the web administrators to tweak
(00:46):
things to make the experience better. So it's not just
about advertising. It's also about how can I make this
website easier to navigate, more intuitive, more interesting, more exciting
to use, or more useful or whatever the purpose of
the website is that benefits the visitor, makes the experience
more satisfying one, and it helps the website administrator also
(01:08):
monetize through web advertising. But now let's get to the
other side of the coin. Tracking information obviously brings with
it some very nasty potential problems like threats to privacy
and security. Information is incredibly valuable. It is the currency
of the Internet. You might thought it was bitcoin, it's not.
(01:30):
Data is your currency. And generally speaking, the more data
a company can get about people who are using the web,
the better it is for that company, not necessarily better
for the people, the better for that company. Knowing information
about a person means being able to sell to that
(01:51):
person more effectively, or it might mean being able to
exploit that person in less legal or ethical ways, and
so they out of gathered about users can become a
tool or a weapon, depending upon the type of information
gathered and the will of the person who has access
to that information. So ideally you don't have any bad
(02:14):
actors out there, and even if people are gathering a
lot of information about users, they're not trying to put
it to any malicious purpose. Before I dive into a
detailed account of web analytics and privacy, I should say
that not everyone is out to scrape every bit of
data off of users or to figure out the identity
of a specific user. Many analyzes are more focused on
(02:37):
identifying emerging trends rather than singling out one specific user,
So the goal is not to look at that data
like a browser's history, like looking at the cookie information
and saying, oh, this person went from X website to
HY website to Z website and then come to the
conclusion of that must be Jonathan Strickland instead. More often
(03:02):
than not, these analytics companies are looking at aggregated data
that is, at least on the service level, anonymous, and
the purpose is to see more valuable information, such as
rose Gold is so totally in right now, so put
all your rose Gold products on your main page because
people are gonna go nuts. Right This really dates this
(03:23):
podcast because I'm about about two years out of touch,
so it tells you this one should have come out
two years ago. Anyway, this concept makes sense when you're
thinking of big sweeping strategies, like which products you want
to feature on an online stores homepage, or which news
stories are likely to be thought of as the most
(03:44):
important and relevant on any given day. So you might
look at something like Google Trends and say, oh, well,
a lot of people are searching this particular term. Let's
create an article about this thing. We can inform people,
we can make sure it's a really good article, but
we can also take advantage of the fact that people
are interested in this idea right now, so it's kind
(04:06):
of a mutually beneficial experience in the ideal. But it
would be silly to say that no one's interested in
your individual preferences, because that's not true. There are people
who are very interested in your individual preferences. For one thing,
it can help identify what different groups of people like,
(04:27):
so a company could present those different groups with distinct
experiences that were meant to appeal to that group. Right.
That's targeted marketing or targeted advertising. So let me give
an example. Let's say I run an online store, and
I've coded my home page in such a way that
(04:47):
it can dynamically display different products based off the information
I glean from analyzing a user's behaviors. And my site
uses cookies and JavaScript, and those analyze the are and
it presents the most appropriate products for return visitors. So
when you pop into my store, I happen to know
(05:08):
that you recently started for Star Wars toys because the
cookie information that I've installed on your browser from your
previous visit has told me this, And so I have
some Star Wars related products that I want to prominently
show to you in my homepage. Now when I say
I want to, all of this is done automatically. You've
(05:28):
got all this meta information, these tags that computers can
use to sort through and select to present what appears
to be the most appropriate products that will appeal to
the visitor. Now, let's say your buddy shows up and
your buddy is not as into Star Wars as you are.
Your buddies like a big clover Field fan, and your
(05:50):
buddy visits my online store and see is a totally
different selection of products than you do when they pop on.
Maybe your buddy is visiting my store for the first time,
in which case I don't have any for any information
about him or her. I don't know anything about this
person because they've just come to my website for the
first time. Now, they come there and I decided to
(06:12):
pop a cookie on their web browser, so i'll know
the next time they come through. But this first time,
it's a blank slate. That means that my store is
probably gonna show them a pretty neutral selection of products.
Maybe there will be some of the most popular products
that happened to appeal to a broad spectrum of people,
(06:32):
but they aren't targeted toward that specific person yet. Because
I don't know what that person's preferences are. But as
your friend navigates through my site, I'm collecting more and
more information about what they like based upon their behaviors,
and then I can make sure the next time they
come to my website that it serves up a more
(06:54):
appropriate landing page for them based upon their preferences. Again,
and I say, I decide this is all automatic. Let's
go a step further. Let's say that you are running
a blog that has online advertising on it. So you've
got spaces on your blog that are reserved for advertising,
(07:14):
and the ads themselves are tracking users with cookies and JavaScript.
Most ads come from brokers who have numerous clients, right,
So let's say that you go to a blog and
you see an ad for a popular soft drink company.
That ad did not come directly from the soft drink company.
More likely than that it came through an advertising company
(07:37):
that has that soft drink company is one of its clients.
So the brokers, these companies that have thousands of clients
representing all these different industries, can use this tracking information
in cookies and JavaScript to determine what stuff you're most
likely to respond to based upon your browsing history, so
that means the broker could potentially serve up ads based
(08:00):
on the information to help improve the chances that you'll
find any given ad more useful and click on it.
In these cases, the experiences are personalized, but that personalization
still is not dependent upon your identity per se. I mean,
it's based upon what you like and what your behaviors
(08:22):
have indicated you find valuable or interesting. But it's not
like that specific data is identifiable stuff like your name
or your address or anything like that. Although they can
at least get an approximation of your address based upon
uh your IB address, so that that could at least
(08:42):
know generally where you were, um maybe more specifically if
you're happy to use a mobile device and you have
location tracking on, or as it turns out, you don't
necessarily have to have location tracking turned on. There was
a recent story from uh AP that looked into this
and said that Google Android devices would check in with
(09:05):
Google an average of fourteen times an hour, giving information
about location even with location services turned off. So that's
a kind of tracking information that definitely rubs people the
wrong way, very valuable information. If Google wants to serve
up ads to you. That's that are based on your
(09:26):
your locale, but not very comforting if you're thinking about
I'm just carrying my phone around. I don't need my
phone telling Google everywhere I'm going throughout the day. Now,
there are instances where a company, an agency, or a
government might want to identify someone based upon their browsing behavior.
For example, let's say that there's a crime that's been
(09:48):
committed and law enforcement has come into possession of a
computer that they believe belonged to the perpetrator of that crime,
but they still don't know who that perpetrator is. They've
got they've up the computer, his or her computer, but
they don't know who that person is yet, and there's
no overtly identifiable information on the computer's hard drive, no fingerprints,
(10:09):
that kind of thing. Would it be possible for an
investigator or an analyst to be able to figure out
the identity of the computer's owner just through that person's
browsing history. If you looked at the information of what
websites they went to, would you be able to figure
out who it was that owned that computer? Well, setting
(10:30):
aside the possibility that the perpetrator had remained signed into
any services that would link back to his or her identity.
The task would require the analysts to look at the
patterns of behaviors and the browser history to figure out
what had the person had that computer's keyboard been doing.
It's kind of scary to think about this, but this
is totally possible to do. It's built upon the same
(10:52):
principles that were used to support e commerce. Back in
two six there were some Russian analysts who proposed a
method of user profiling that would create profiles of users
based on their browser history. So you would get shoveled
into progressively smaller groups based on your behavior. So you know,
(11:14):
initial analysis might put you in one of several broad categories,
but the more specific behaviors you exhibit, the more specific
the groups could be that you would be sorted into,
and that would represent profiles. As word vectors, that's a
method to assign context to words that ties into natural
(11:36):
language processing. I did a couple episodes on those a
little while back. The researchers use those word vectors to
create clusters of topics in a hierarchy to determine or
determined by rather user behavior and the stuff that users valued.
More as demonstrated in their behavior by following links or
staying on certain pages for a longer time, or making
(11:58):
searches would occupy a higher place in that hierarchy, and
that was one way of identifying users, at least by interest.
Now again that didn't assign a name yet, but that
was a building block towards this. There's a two thousand
seven paper I read that described a different approach that
could predict a user's gender and age based on his
or her web browsing behavior. The researchers created a model
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that relied on users reporting their age and their gender,
so it's a self reporting kind of thing, and they
would also give up access to their browsing history to
this model, and the model would learn the associate to
associate certain behaviors with respect to age and gender and
draw general conclusions based on that. And once it learned
(12:42):
through this training process, it could then analyze an unknown
users browser history and then predict that person's gender and age.
I don't know how accurate it was. I came across
this information all reading a totally different but related paper,
didn't have time to track down the two seven document.
By this does lead to the way law enforcement might
(13:04):
use user profiling to identify someone based on their browser behavior.
I'll explain more in just a second, but first let's
take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Before the break,
I mentioned a paper that related paper was specifically about
(13:26):
identifying a suspect based on their web behavior and it
has the title Web user profiling based on Browsing Behavior Analysis.
And in that paper, the researchers describe a method in
which a computer believed to belong to a suspect is
compared to other computers that have known users. So law
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enforcement gets hold of a computer, they know that this
computer was used by the perpetrator of a crime. They
don't have an identity yet, they do have some suspects.
They don't know if any of the suspects actually were
the perpetrator. So the goal is to take this target computer,
the one that was involved with the actual perpetrator, with
(14:07):
candidate computers the ones that suspects are using, and factors
such as the specific sites that were visited, the time
spent on every site, the order that the user would
browse the sites. All of these things are taken into consideration,
and at the heart of the matter is the idea
that we humans tend to be creatures of habit. So
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here's how it would work. Investigators take that target computer
and they perform a data extraction on the computer. They
pull all the information they can off of it to
get a lead on the identity, and includes the browser
history and browser behaviors, and they analyze this. They have
identified some suspects and those suspects may be using other
(14:47):
computer s access online services, and those are the candidate computers.
So law enforcement gets possession of those candidate computers, presumably
through a warrant, and they preserve they do the same
sort of thing. They do a data extraction on each
of those computers. Then they process all that information and
they analyze it, and investigators determine which factors are domains
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of interest, like what what are the things in the
target computer that could potentially be identify irs for somebody,
and they break this down into a vector representation. They
wait each of the factors to assign each one in
relative importance. So, for example, awaiting might represent that the
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activity on the target computer showed the perpetrator repeatedly visited
the same five websites, so those websites would be weighted
heavier than others because the perpetrator had gone to them
multiple times, and it might within those five websites, each
of those websites might have their own weighting that is
based upon the amount of time spent on those sites
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and the number of times that the perpetrator had logged
into them that are recorded in that browser history. These
indicate trends and behaviors. Then you would compare that with
the information you found from the candidate computers, and if
you found one that demonstrated a similar browsing behavior as
the one that was on the target computer, you can
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make an argument that the respective suspect may well be
your criminal, then you can consider them a lead. It's
not exactly a smoking gun, but it's certainly says this
person browses on the Internet exactly the same way as
the person who owned this computer, and we know the
person who owned this computer committed the crime, and it
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can lead you into a more specific investigation. In two
thousand and seventeen, Gizmoto ran a piece titled Here's all
the data collected from you as you browse the Web,
and it was written by David Neild and I really
recommend checking out this article. Again, it's called here's all
the data collected from you as you browse the web.
(16:59):
It's great piece. I'm gonna kind of go over it
here a little bit. Neil points out the type of
data your computer can share with sites on the Internet,
and as he mentions, it can include all of the following.
Your IP address. Now that makes sense. The IP address
corresponds to your computer or your router UH or a router.
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It's necessary so that a site knows where to send
the data that you've requested. So if you visit a
website your typically you're technically sending a request to a
web server. The server has to know where to send
that site otherwise you'll never get anything back. But an
IP address can provide information that gives the site owners
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a general idea of your location, not specifically where you are,
but generally where you are. Then there's the type of
system you're using, such as whether or not you're on
a phone or a tablet, or a computer or a
gaming console. UH. This is what will also typically include
information like the operating system that you're using, the display
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resolution on the device you have, what processors your machine
might have like CPU and GPU, and the specific types
like how many cores that how much processing power that
kind of stuff, Which browser you might be using, what
plugins you have installed in that browser, your devices battery
charge could be part of the information. All of that
(18:28):
is part of the information that that your machine is
handing over. In this exchange, Neild also mentions the web
page that will let you know all the data your
browser since two pages. By default, that site is called
web k dot robin linus dot com or linus if
you prefer, it's w E B k A Y dot
(18:50):
R O b I n l I n us dot com.
So I went ahead and checked it out just to
see what would say about my connection here at work.
So it knew my work computer is running when seven, yeah,
I know. It also knew that I was using Chrome
as my browser. It identified the GPU and the CPU
for my computer. It knew what resolution I had set
(19:14):
my screen. It knew my laptops battery was at a
charge because it was plugged into a docking station at
the time. It identified the I s B my office uses.
It identified the download speed I had available to me.
It estimated my location. It was off by a couple
of blocks, but it was in the general area. It
identified which social media accounts I was logged into at
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that time. If it had been a mobile device, um,
it would have also told me about my devices orientation,
like whether it was in portrait or landscape mode, and
more information like that. And then yield linked to another
site called click that one can monitor mouse movements and
mouse clicks and how active you are with a site.
(19:57):
I visited this one too, and it was kind of creepy.
It's just find in a way to actually reveal to
you how much information is being sent to a website.
So there's actually a voice that talks to you, prerecorded
stuff that's meant to be a little unsettling, and it
sends you information telling you, oh, you just move the
mouse to the right, you just moved it to the left,
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You've sat still for thirty seconds, You've been viewing this
page for a minute. So this is all information that
could be sent to a site like they could actually
monitor where is your mouse moving across a web page,
which again gets a little creepy. Right now, there are
legitimate uses for that kind of information from a website
design perspective, it could tell you a lot about the
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sort of things users find attractive or interesting. About your website,
but there are also potential misuses and legit analytics firms
won't use information to compromise users privacy, but not everyone's legit.
Here's another example. Let's say that you are in a
faery person. Actually, I'm not gonna say that you're a
(21:02):
nice person, you're not nefarious. Let's say there is a
nefarious person out there, and this nefarious person has installed
some rogue JavaScript on a website, then has tricked people
into going to it, and is able to give certain
bits of information that appear to include compromising information about
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the user, and they're able to contact the user to
send a message out to that users perhaps their email
address or something on those lines, and through this method
of contact, they are trying to blackmail the users, saying
I have dirt on you because I know that you've
visited such and such website. Maybe it's an adult content website,
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maybe it's a website that's about a sensitive subject. And
they're able to tell this from the cookies or the JavaScript,
and so they're sending a message that's essentially saying, if
you don't cooperate with me, I'm going to reveal the
information I have about you, Now that may not be
that they have any real information about you, anything that's
(22:07):
of any real damaging worth. But they're trading on people's
natural fears and and they know that even if not
of their attacks are going to be successful, at least
enough of them will be for it to be worthwhile.
So that's one way someone might make nefarious use of
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this kind of data. I'll talk a little bit about
some ways that governments and companies and individuals have tried
to protect themselves and others from this kind of abuse
in just a second, but first let's take another quick
break to thank our sponsor. Now, there are some laws
(22:55):
in place that help protect people from predatory use of
their data. In the United States gets a little loosey goosey.
There's some state level laws in some places, but obviously
those apply within a state, not across the entire country.
There are a few federal protections that are in place.
In Europe, the protections are way more extensive. The g
(23:17):
d PR resolution is an example of that, but it's
just one example of that. So in Europe people generally
enjoy a better level of protection as far as uh
their data security is concerned, and there are a lot
of analytics companies out there that have tried to address
these issues because they want to know. They want people
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to know, Hey, what we do is valuable. What we
do actually is part of what makes the Internet work.
As long as we do it with accountability and we
do it with respect to your privacy, everything should be
fine and everyone should benefit. So one of the big
pushes in the industry is to be more transparent about
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what which data points these rights are collecting and to
what purpose, Like why are they collecting all this information?
And it can't just be transparent. It needs to be
worded in a way that makes sense. It's not buried
in jargon and legal ease, because then just nine people
just skip over it and they don't get angry until
something goes wrong. So being able to explain in blame language, hey,
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we are collecting these data points about people. This is
how we're using that data. Here's how you will benefit
from that use, and here's how we benefit from that use.
If it's completely transparent, everyone is much less likely to
get upset because they're less likely to misinterpret what is
(24:41):
happening or to make assumptions about the worst right. So
tracking in itself might not be malicious. It's meant to
make things better for everybody, but it's also very easy
to misuse the information and data is valuable right, so
it has actual real value to it. That means bad
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actors will go after it too. So what can you
do on a personal level to protect yourself. One thing
is that browsers have a do not track setting that
you can enact. You can enable do not tracked track. Rather,
in theory, that protocol would mean that sites would agree
not to track you. Now, I say in theory because
(25:24):
there's nothing legally requiring sites to obey that protocol, so
they might track you anyway. The more reputable ones probably won't,
but other sites might not really give it any mind,
so it's not really the safest approach. You can try
to browse in private or incognito mode and a browser
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lots of browsers allowed for this, and usually what that
means is it will only load cookies for that current session,
so you're not gonna have cookies save to the browser
in this way, so that reduces a site's ability to
track your information. Although the longer you stay on a
site and the more you click around, the more information
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you are giving that site. Uh, Incognito mode really only
kind of a racist trace of your activities on that
local device. So the computer you're using, the mobile device
you're using, whatever that may be. Incognito mode really just
keeps it from being you know, your activities being left
on that device. Your Internet service provider will still see
(26:29):
where you're going, because it has to in order to
be able to send you the information that you're requesting
through the web browser. Um, you still have an IP
address that can still narrow down where you live or
where you're accessing the information from. If you log into
a service like Facebook or Twitter or something like that,
that's a dead giveaway. So this is a limited help.
(26:50):
Another thing you might do is install browser extensions that
limit active scripts from running on websites without your authorization.
So there are extensions like no Script Security Suite that's
for Firefox, UH, their Script Safe that's for Chrome. These
are extensions that put the control in your hands. So
when you access a site that has one of these
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sort of invisible trackers on it or whatever, it'll pop
up and alert you and you can choose to either
allow it or to prevent it from being able to
track you. UH. At least in the JavaScript approach. If
people are looking at their access logs, that's still gonna
show that you've visited the site, but it won't give
the kind of tiny amounts of data that JavaScript would.
(27:34):
Tiny tiny is in focused, there's actually quite a lot
of data. The Electronic Frontier Foundation offers up an extension
for Firefox, Opera, and Android called Privacy Badger. This add
on blocks trackers and spy wear. Specifically, it quote stops
advertisers and other third party trackers from secretly tracking where
you go and what pages you look at on the web.
(27:57):
If an advertiser seems to be tracking you across multiple
websites without your permission, Privacy Badger automatically blocks that advertiser
from loading any more content in your browser. To the advertiser,
it looks like you suddenly disappeared. End quote. So it
does this by identifying which content sources are registering your
presence on a web page, including the ads that are
(28:18):
loaded on that web page, and as you go from
one page to another, if it keeps picking up the
same sources, that's an indication that you're being tracked, and
those are the ones that will um it will stop
loading into your web browser, and since it stops loading it,
the source can no longer get information about your activities,
and it's like you just disappeared into thin air. But
(28:39):
what about them virtual private networks. I'm gonna have to
do a full episode about VPNs and why they exist
and why they're important and when you should use one.
I'll do one of those in the future, but generally,
in this context, they're mostly good for hiding your physical location. UH.
The lokal ation will appear to correspond to that of
(29:02):
the virtual private network, not to you, not to your
real world location, because the web browser will be acting
like the VPN is the source of the traffic, not
not your computer, and the VPN handles it from that
point to get it to you. So you would still
(29:24):
get cookies from sites. They'd still be able to track
your activities, but I would do it through the the
context of the VPN and UH. And since your behaviors
are filtering through the VPN instead of your normal I
s P, what you're really doing is trading one entity
for another. Instead of having the I s P be
the one monitoring all the stuff you're doing, the VPN
(29:46):
could technically monitor all the stuff you're doing, so I
guess then it just comes down to who do you
trust more, the VPN or the I s p UM.
The answer is going to be very dependent upon which
of those entities are you're making use of at any
given time. So one last little bit about the pros
and cons of tracking. Tracking is what makes online advertising work.
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So it's somewhat infuriating because online tracking gives us a
really granular view of which ads work on which sites,
and which ones don't. We learned about how different form
factors can be more or less effective. You might find
out that at A tests really well on site one,
but it fails miserably on site too. But AD B,
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which is for the exact same product, is at A,
but it's a different design that one works great on
site too. Or maybe you find out just by changing
where an AD displays on a page it drives more engagement.
The reason this is important is because running a website
is not free. If it were, the world would be
a very different place. So companies like how stuff works
(30:51):
dot Com have costs associated with them, right, and those
are significant costs, not just like web hosting, but other
stuff like off the space, lay salaries, healthcare lots and
lots of costs. So if there's no money coming in
to cover those costs, you won't stay in business. You
go into debt. Eventually you go into bankruptcy. Uh. So
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you want to make money to pay off the costs,
and you really want to make enough to make a profit.
I mean, that's what a business is all about, is
making profits. So without profit, businesses don't really exist. And
then the content goes away. So unless we move to
a totally different model of the web, which probably be
one where we have to pay for everything we want
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to access, everything would be behind a paywall, it would
be really hard to continue to have web content. We
have to have some financial means to support the content
or else the content goes away. Same thing is true
for podcasts. I mean, the reason we have sponsors is
to h to pay off the costs of producing these
(31:59):
shows and posting the shows and continue to develop shows
and make new shows. The ads support that, and hopefully
the ads that we are choosing to place with shows
are meaningful to our listeners, because if they're not, then
it's not really doing anyone any good. And ultimately, you
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want the best possible relationship between content, advertising, and users.
You want something where everybody is happy with it, because otherwise,
what's the point. The same thing is true with the website,
so the tracking is very important to get that kind
of information. It's kind of funny to me because classic media,
(32:43):
your traditional media, things like television, magazines, newspapers, that kind
of stuff, everything that has advertising in it, Uh, it's
a lot harder to tell how well that advertising works,
how much impact that advertising has. With the exception of
stuff like the Super Bowl in the United States, where
people famously will tune in just to watch commercials, you
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really don't know how much attention is being directed toward commercials.
You might be able to get some general ratings about
how well a certain television show has done, but that
doesn't really tell you anything about the ads themselves. So
it's funny to me that the traditional media, the advertising world,
(33:27):
is very comfortable in that space and in the online
space where we can actually see how well an ad
does because we can see how many people click on it,
how many people actually went through and said this is interesting,
I want to know more, I want to be able
to buy this. We can actually see how effective that is,
and somehow that makes it less valuable, uh in some cases,
(33:52):
like the CPMs that are demanded and in direct mail,
like sending stuff out in magazines and things that's way
higher than what you typically see for most online advertising. Um,
one of those things where a little knowledge can be dangerous.
I guess, very fascinating topic. And while you can go
(34:13):
through and do those extensions and use VPNs and things
and turn off a lot of the the elements that
will allow sites to track you, if you do that,
you also lose that of the benefits that tracking gives
to users. That might be a worthy trade off for
(34:34):
you if you really value your privacy and you don't
want sites to get access to that kind of information.
But UM, you know it's it's it's just this kind
of the way our online world works, and without some
sort of transformative change, I don't see that being any
different anytime soon. But it is an interesting subject. If
(34:57):
you guys have any ideas for future episodes, I any
sort of topic you want me to cover, whether it's
a technology, a company, a person in tech. Maybe there's
someone I should interview or have on as a guest host.
Send me a message. The email addresses tech stuff at
how Stuff works dot com or drop me a line
on Facebook or Twitter to handle it. Both of those
is tech stuff hs W. Don't forget. Head on over
(35:19):
to T public dot com slash tech stuff. That's T
e e Public dot com slash tech stuff to get
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you're sitting there thinking, I have a cup of hot
coffee sitting here, but I have no mug to put
it in. Get yourself a tech stuff mug. They're pretty awesome.
(35:40):
I've got two of them myself, And don't forget to
follow us on Instagram. Don't talk to you again really
soon for more on this and thousands of other topics
because it how stuff works dot com. Who who Who
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
how Stuff Works and I love all things tech and
in our last episode, I talked about how web analytics
work in general and why they are important both for
(00:25):
people visiting a website and owners of websites and the
advertisers who support websites and the companies that advertise through
these advertisers. They really help website designers also get a
better understanding of how their users navigate and consume stuff
on their sites and allows the web administrators to tweak
(00:46):
things to make the experience better. So it's not just
about advertising. It's also about how can I make this
website easier to navigate, more intuitive, more interesting, more exciting
to use, or more useful or whatever the purpose of
the website is that benefits the visitor, makes the experience
more satisfying one, and it helps the website administrator also
(01:08):
monetize through web advertising. But now let's get to the
other side of the coin. Tracking information obviously brings with
it some very nasty potential problems like threats to privacy
and security. Information is incredibly valuable. It is the currency
of the Internet. You might thought it was bitcoin, it's not.
(01:30):
Data is your currency. And generally speaking, the more data
a company can get about people who are using the web,
the better it is for that company, not necessarily better
for the people, the better for that company. Knowing information
about a person means being able to sell to that
(01:51):
person more effectively, or it might mean being able to
exploit that person in less legal or ethical ways, and
so they out of gathered about users can become a
tool or a weapon, depending upon the type of information
gathered and the will of the person who has access
to that information. So ideally you don't have any bad
(02:14):
actors out there, and even if people are gathering a
lot of information about users, they're not trying to put
it to any malicious purpose. Before I dive into a
detailed account of web analytics and privacy, I should say
that not everyone is out to scrape every bit of
data off of users or to figure out the identity
of a specific user. Many analyzes are more focused on
(02:37):
identifying emerging trends rather than singling out one specific user,
So the goal is not to look at that data
like a browser's history, like looking at the cookie information
and saying, oh, this person went from X website to
HY website to Z website and then come to the
conclusion of that must be Jonathan Strickland instead. More often
(03:02):
than not, these analytics companies are looking at aggregated data
that is, at least on the service level, anonymous, and
the purpose is to see more valuable information, such as
rose Gold is so totally in right now, so put
all your rose Gold products on your main page because
people are gonna go nuts. Right This really dates this
(03:23):
podcast because I'm about about two years out of touch,
so it tells you this one should have come out
two years ago. Anyway, this concept makes sense when you're
thinking of big sweeping strategies, like which products you want
to feature on an online stores homepage, or which news
stories are likely to be thought of as the most
(03:44):
important and relevant on any given day. So you might
look at something like Google Trends and say, oh, well,
a lot of people are searching this particular term. Let's
create an article about this thing. We can inform people,
we can make sure it's a really good article, but
we can also take advantage of the fact that people
are interested in this idea right now, so it's kind
(04:06):
of a mutually beneficial experience in the ideal. But it
would be silly to say that no one's interested in
your individual preferences, because that's not true. There are people
who are very interested in your individual preferences. For one thing,
it can help identify what different groups of people like,
(04:27):
so a company could present those different groups with distinct
experiences that were meant to appeal to that group. Right.
That's targeted marketing or targeted advertising. So let me give
an example. Let's say I run an online store, and
I've coded my home page in such a way that
(04:47):
it can dynamically display different products based off the information
I glean from analyzing a user's behaviors. And my site
uses cookies and JavaScript, and those analyze the are and
it presents the most appropriate products for return visitors. So
when you pop into my store, I happen to know
(05:08):
that you recently started for Star Wars toys because the
cookie information that I've installed on your browser from your
previous visit has told me this, And so I have
some Star Wars related products that I want to prominently
show to you in my homepage. Now when I say
I want to, all of this is done automatically. You've
(05:28):
got all this meta information, these tags that computers can
use to sort through and select to present what appears
to be the most appropriate products that will appeal to
the visitor. Now, let's say your buddy shows up and
your buddy is not as into Star Wars as you are.
Your buddies like a big clover Field fan, and your
(05:50):
buddy visits my online store and see is a totally
different selection of products than you do when they pop on.
Maybe your buddy is visiting my store for the first time,
in which case I don't have any for any information
about him or her. I don't know anything about this
person because they've just come to my website for the
first time. Now, they come there and I decided to
(06:12):
pop a cookie on their web browser, so i'll know
the next time they come through. But this first time,
it's a blank slate. That means that my store is
probably gonna show them a pretty neutral selection of products.
Maybe there will be some of the most popular products
that happened to appeal to a broad spectrum of people,
(06:32):
but they aren't targeted toward that specific person yet. Because
I don't know what that person's preferences are. But as
your friend navigates through my site, I'm collecting more and
more information about what they like based upon their behaviors,
and then I can make sure the next time they
come to my website that it serves up a more
(06:54):
appropriate landing page for them based upon their preferences. Again,
and I say, I decide this is all automatic. Let's
go a step further. Let's say that you are running
a blog that has online advertising on it. So you've
got spaces on your blog that are reserved for advertising,
(07:14):
and the ads themselves are tracking users with cookies and JavaScript.
Most ads come from brokers who have numerous clients, right,
So let's say that you go to a blog and
you see an ad for a popular soft drink company.
That ad did not come directly from the soft drink company.
More likely than that it came through an advertising company
(07:37):
that has that soft drink company is one of its clients.
So the brokers, these companies that have thousands of clients
representing all these different industries, can use this tracking information
in cookies and JavaScript to determine what stuff you're most
likely to respond to based upon your browsing history, so
that means the broker could potentially serve up ads based
(08:00):
on the information to help improve the chances that you'll
find any given ad more useful and click on it.
In these cases, the experiences are personalized, but that personalization
still is not dependent upon your identity per se. I mean,
it's based upon what you like and what your behaviors
(08:22):
have indicated you find valuable or interesting. But it's not
like that specific data is identifiable stuff like your name
or your address or anything like that. Although they can
at least get an approximation of your address based upon
uh your IB address, so that that could at least
(08:42):
know generally where you were, um maybe more specifically if
you're happy to use a mobile device and you have
location tracking on, or as it turns out, you don't
necessarily have to have location tracking turned on. There was
a recent story from uh AP that looked into this
and said that Google Android devices would check in with
(09:05):
Google an average of fourteen times an hour, giving information
about location even with location services turned off. So that's
a kind of tracking information that definitely rubs people the
wrong way, very valuable information. If Google wants to serve
up ads to you. That's that are based on your
(09:26):
your locale, but not very comforting if you're thinking about
I'm just carrying my phone around. I don't need my
phone telling Google everywhere I'm going throughout the day. Now,
there are instances where a company, an agency, or a
government might want to identify someone based upon their browsing behavior.
For example, let's say that there's a crime that's been
(09:48):
committed and law enforcement has come into possession of a
computer that they believe belonged to the perpetrator of that crime,
but they still don't know who that perpetrator is. They've
got they've up the computer, his or her computer, but
they don't know who that person is yet, and there's
no overtly identifiable information on the computer's hard drive, no fingerprints,
(10:09):
that kind of thing. Would it be possible for an
investigator or an analyst to be able to figure out
the identity of the computer's owner just through that person's
browsing history. If you looked at the information of what
websites they went to, would you be able to figure
out who it was that owned that computer? Well, setting
(10:30):
aside the possibility that the perpetrator had remained signed into
any services that would link back to his or her identity.
The task would require the analysts to look at the
patterns of behaviors and the browser history to figure out
what had the person had that computer's keyboard been doing.
It's kind of scary to think about this, but this
is totally possible to do. It's built upon the same
(10:52):
principles that were used to support e commerce. Back in
two six there were some Russian analysts who proposed a
method of user profiling that would create profiles of users
based on their browser history. So you would get shoveled
into progressively smaller groups based on your behavior. So you know,
(11:14):
initial analysis might put you in one of several broad categories,
but the more specific behaviors you exhibit, the more specific
the groups could be that you would be sorted into,
and that would represent profiles. As word vectors, that's a
method to assign context to words that ties into natural
(11:36):
language processing. I did a couple episodes on those a
little while back. The researchers use those word vectors to
create clusters of topics in a hierarchy to determine or
determined by rather user behavior and the stuff that users valued.
More as demonstrated in their behavior by following links or
staying on certain pages for a longer time, or making
(11:58):
searches would occupy a higher place in that hierarchy, and
that was one way of identifying users, at least by interest.
Now again that didn't assign a name yet, but that
was a building block towards this. There's a two thousand
seven paper I read that described a different approach that
could predict a user's gender and age based on his
or her web browsing behavior. The researchers created a model
(12:19):
that relied on users reporting their age and their gender,
so it's a self reporting kind of thing, and they
would also give up access to their browsing history to
this model, and the model would learn the associate to
associate certain behaviors with respect to age and gender and
draw general conclusions based on that. And once it learned
(12:42):
through this training process, it could then analyze an unknown
users browser history and then predict that person's gender and age.
I don't know how accurate it was. I came across
this information all reading a totally different but related paper,
didn't have time to track down the two seven document.
By this does lead to the way law enforcement might
(13:04):
use user profiling to identify someone based on their browser behavior.
I'll explain more in just a second, but first let's
take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Before the break,
I mentioned a paper that related paper was specifically about
(13:26):
identifying a suspect based on their web behavior and it
has the title Web user profiling based on Browsing Behavior Analysis.
And in that paper, the researchers describe a method in
which a computer believed to belong to a suspect is
compared to other computers that have known users. So law
(13:46):
enforcement gets hold of a computer, they know that this
computer was used by the perpetrator of a crime. They
don't have an identity yet, they do have some suspects.
They don't know if any of the suspects actually were
the perpetrator. So the goal is to take this target computer,
the one that was involved with the actual perpetrator, with
(14:07):
candidate computers the ones that suspects are using, and factors
such as the specific sites that were visited, the time
spent on every site, the order that the user would
browse the sites. All of these things are taken into consideration,
and at the heart of the matter is the idea
that we humans tend to be creatures of habit. So
(14:27):
here's how it would work. Investigators take that target computer
and they perform a data extraction on the computer. They
pull all the information they can off of it to
get a lead on the identity, and includes the browser
history and browser behaviors, and they analyze this. They have
identified some suspects and those suspects may be using other
(14:47):
computer s access online services, and those are the candidate computers.
So law enforcement gets possession of those candidate computers, presumably
through a warrant, and they preserve they do the same
sort of thing. They do a data extraction on each
of those computers. Then they process all that information and
they analyze it, and investigators determine which factors are domains
(15:11):
of interest, like what what are the things in the
target computer that could potentially be identify irs for somebody,
and they break this down into a vector representation. They
wait each of the factors to assign each one in
relative importance. So, for example, awaiting might represent that the
(15:32):
activity on the target computer showed the perpetrator repeatedly visited
the same five websites, so those websites would be weighted
heavier than others because the perpetrator had gone to them
multiple times, and it might within those five websites, each
of those websites might have their own weighting that is
based upon the amount of time spent on those sites
(15:55):
and the number of times that the perpetrator had logged
into them that are recorded in that browser history. These
indicate trends and behaviors. Then you would compare that with
the information you found from the candidate computers, and if
you found one that demonstrated a similar browsing behavior as
the one that was on the target computer, you can
(16:16):
make an argument that the respective suspect may well be
your criminal, then you can consider them a lead. It's
not exactly a smoking gun, but it's certainly says this
person browses on the Internet exactly the same way as
the person who owned this computer, and we know the
person who owned this computer committed the crime, and it
(16:39):
can lead you into a more specific investigation. In two
thousand and seventeen, Gizmoto ran a piece titled Here's all
the data collected from you as you browse the Web,
and it was written by David Neild and I really
recommend checking out this article. Again, it's called here's all
the data collected from you as you browse the web.
(16:59):
It's great piece. I'm gonna kind of go over it
here a little bit. Neil points out the type of
data your computer can share with sites on the Internet,
and as he mentions, it can include all of the following.
Your IP address. Now that makes sense. The IP address
corresponds to your computer or your router UH or a router.
(17:21):
It's necessary so that a site knows where to send
the data that you've requested. So if you visit a
website your typically you're technically sending a request to a
web server. The server has to know where to send
that site otherwise you'll never get anything back. But an
IP address can provide information that gives the site owners
(17:42):
a general idea of your location, not specifically where you are,
but generally where you are. Then there's the type of
system you're using, such as whether or not you're on
a phone or a tablet, or a computer or a
gaming console. UH. This is what will also typically include
information like the operating system that you're using, the display
(18:04):
resolution on the device you have, what processors your machine
might have like CPU and GPU, and the specific types
like how many cores that how much processing power that
kind of stuff, Which browser you might be using, what
plugins you have installed in that browser, your devices battery
charge could be part of the information. All of that
(18:28):
is part of the information that that your machine is
handing over. In this exchange, Neild also mentions the web
page that will let you know all the data your
browser since two pages. By default, that site is called
web k dot robin linus dot com or linus if
you prefer, it's w E B k A Y dot
(18:50):
R O b I n l I n us dot com.
So I went ahead and checked it out just to
see what would say about my connection here at work.
So it knew my work computer is running when seven, yeah,
I know. It also knew that I was using Chrome
as my browser. It identified the GPU and the CPU
for my computer. It knew what resolution I had set
(19:14):
my screen. It knew my laptops battery was at a
charge because it was plugged into a docking station at
the time. It identified the I s B my office uses.
It identified the download speed I had available to me.
It estimated my location. It was off by a couple
of blocks, but it was in the general area. It
identified which social media accounts I was logged into at
(19:37):
that time. If it had been a mobile device, um,
it would have also told me about my devices orientation,
like whether it was in portrait or landscape mode, and
more information like that. And then yield linked to another
site called click that one can monitor mouse movements and
mouse clicks and how active you are with a site.
(19:57):
I visited this one too, and it was kind of creepy.
It's just find in a way to actually reveal to
you how much information is being sent to a website.
So there's actually a voice that talks to you, prerecorded
stuff that's meant to be a little unsettling, and it
sends you information telling you, oh, you just move the
mouse to the right, you just moved it to the left,
(20:20):
You've sat still for thirty seconds, You've been viewing this
page for a minute. So this is all information that
could be sent to a site like they could actually
monitor where is your mouse moving across a web page,
which again gets a little creepy. Right now, there are
legitimate uses for that kind of information from a website
design perspective, it could tell you a lot about the
(20:41):
sort of things users find attractive or interesting. About your website,
but there are also potential misuses and legit analytics firms
won't use information to compromise users privacy, but not everyone's legit.
Here's another example. Let's say that you are in a
faery person. Actually, I'm not gonna say that you're a
(21:02):
nice person, you're not nefarious. Let's say there is a
nefarious person out there, and this nefarious person has installed
some rogue JavaScript on a website, then has tricked people
into going to it, and is able to give certain
bits of information that appear to include compromising information about
(21:24):
the user, and they're able to contact the user to
send a message out to that users perhaps their email
address or something on those lines, and through this method
of contact, they are trying to blackmail the users, saying
I have dirt on you because I know that you've
visited such and such website. Maybe it's an adult content website,
(21:46):
maybe it's a website that's about a sensitive subject. And
they're able to tell this from the cookies or the JavaScript,
and so they're sending a message that's essentially saying, if
you don't cooperate with me, I'm going to reveal the
information I have about you, Now that may not be
that they have any real information about you, anything that's
(22:07):
of any real damaging worth. But they're trading on people's
natural fears and and they know that even if not
of their attacks are going to be successful, at least
enough of them will be for it to be worthwhile.
So that's one way someone might make nefarious use of
(22:28):
this kind of data. I'll talk a little bit about
some ways that governments and companies and individuals have tried
to protect themselves and others from this kind of abuse
in just a second, but first let's take another quick
break to thank our sponsor. Now, there are some laws
(22:55):
in place that help protect people from predatory use of
their data. In the United States gets a little loosey goosey.
There's some state level laws in some places, but obviously
those apply within a state, not across the entire country.
There are a few federal protections that are in place.
In Europe, the protections are way more extensive. The g
(23:17):
d PR resolution is an example of that, but it's
just one example of that. So in Europe people generally
enjoy a better level of protection as far as uh
their data security is concerned, and there are a lot
of analytics companies out there that have tried to address
these issues because they want to know. They want people
(23:37):
to know, Hey, what we do is valuable. What we
do actually is part of what makes the Internet work.
As long as we do it with accountability and we
do it with respect to your privacy, everything should be
fine and everyone should benefit. So one of the big
pushes in the industry is to be more transparent about
(23:57):
what which data points these rights are collecting and to
what purpose, Like why are they collecting all this information?
And it can't just be transparent. It needs to be
worded in a way that makes sense. It's not buried
in jargon and legal ease, because then just nine people
just skip over it and they don't get angry until
something goes wrong. So being able to explain in blame language, hey,
(24:21):
we are collecting these data points about people. This is
how we're using that data. Here's how you will benefit
from that use, and here's how we benefit from that use.
If it's completely transparent, everyone is much less likely to
get upset because they're less likely to misinterpret what is
(24:41):
happening or to make assumptions about the worst right. So
tracking in itself might not be malicious. It's meant to
make things better for everybody, but it's also very easy
to misuse the information and data is valuable right, so
it has actual real value to it. That means bad
(25:02):
actors will go after it too. So what can you
do on a personal level to protect yourself. One thing
is that browsers have a do not track setting that
you can enact. You can enable do not tracked track. Rather,
in theory, that protocol would mean that sites would agree
not to track you. Now, I say in theory because
(25:24):
there's nothing legally requiring sites to obey that protocol, so
they might track you anyway. The more reputable ones probably won't,
but other sites might not really give it any mind,
so it's not really the safest approach. You can try
to browse in private or incognito mode and a browser
(25:45):
lots of browsers allowed for this, and usually what that
means is it will only load cookies for that current session,
so you're not gonna have cookies save to the browser
in this way, so that reduces a site's ability to
track your information. Although the longer you stay on a
site and the more you click around, the more information
(26:07):
you are giving that site. Uh, Incognito mode really only
kind of a racist trace of your activities on that
local device. So the computer you're using, the mobile device
you're using, whatever that may be. Incognito mode really just
keeps it from being you know, your activities being left
on that device. Your Internet service provider will still see
(26:29):
where you're going, because it has to in order to
be able to send you the information that you're requesting
through the web browser. Um, you still have an IP
address that can still narrow down where you live or
where you're accessing the information from. If you log into
a service like Facebook or Twitter or something like that,
that's a dead giveaway. So this is a limited help.
(26:50):
Another thing you might do is install browser extensions that
limit active scripts from running on websites without your authorization.
So there are extensions like no Script Security Suite that's
for Firefox, UH, their Script Safe that's for Chrome. These
are extensions that put the control in your hands. So
when you access a site that has one of these
(27:11):
sort of invisible trackers on it or whatever, it'll pop
up and alert you and you can choose to either
allow it or to prevent it from being able to
track you. UH. At least in the JavaScript approach. If
people are looking at their access logs, that's still gonna
show that you've visited the site, but it won't give
the kind of tiny amounts of data that JavaScript would.
(27:34):
Tiny tiny is in focused, there's actually quite a lot
of data. The Electronic Frontier Foundation offers up an extension
for Firefox, Opera, and Android called Privacy Badger. This add
on blocks trackers and spy wear. Specifically, it quote stops
advertisers and other third party trackers from secretly tracking where
you go and what pages you look at on the web.
(27:57):
If an advertiser seems to be tracking you across multiple
websites without your permission, Privacy Badger automatically blocks that advertiser
from loading any more content in your browser. To the advertiser,
it looks like you suddenly disappeared. End quote. So it
does this by identifying which content sources are registering your
presence on a web page, including the ads that are
(28:18):
loaded on that web page, and as you go from
one page to another, if it keeps picking up the
same sources, that's an indication that you're being tracked, and
those are the ones that will um it will stop
loading into your web browser, and since it stops loading it,
the source can no longer get information about your activities,
and it's like you just disappeared into thin air. But
(28:39):
what about them virtual private networks. I'm gonna have to
do a full episode about VPNs and why they exist
and why they're important and when you should use one.
I'll do one of those in the future, but generally,
in this context, they're mostly good for hiding your physical location. UH.
The lokal ation will appear to correspond to that of
(29:02):
the virtual private network, not to you, not to your
real world location, because the web browser will be acting
like the VPN is the source of the traffic, not
not your computer, and the VPN handles it from that
point to get it to you. So you would still
(29:24):
get cookies from sites. They'd still be able to track
your activities, but I would do it through the the
context of the VPN and UH. And since your behaviors
are filtering through the VPN instead of your normal I
s P, what you're really doing is trading one entity
for another. Instead of having the I s P be
the one monitoring all the stuff you're doing, the VPN
(29:46):
could technically monitor all the stuff you're doing, so I
guess then it just comes down to who do you
trust more, the VPN or the I s p UM.
The answer is going to be very dependent upon which
of those entities are you're making use of at any
given time. So one last little bit about the pros
and cons of tracking. Tracking is what makes online advertising work.
(30:10):
So it's somewhat infuriating because online tracking gives us a
really granular view of which ads work on which sites,
and which ones don't. We learned about how different form
factors can be more or less effective. You might find
out that at A tests really well on site one,
but it fails miserably on site too. But AD B,
(30:30):
which is for the exact same product, is at A,
but it's a different design that one works great on
site too. Or maybe you find out just by changing
where an AD displays on a page it drives more engagement.
The reason this is important is because running a website
is not free. If it were, the world would be
a very different place. So companies like how stuff works
(30:51):
dot Com have costs associated with them, right, and those
are significant costs, not just like web hosting, but other
stuff like off the space, lay salaries, healthcare lots and
lots of costs. So if there's no money coming in
to cover those costs, you won't stay in business. You
go into debt. Eventually you go into bankruptcy. Uh. So
(31:14):
you want to make money to pay off the costs,
and you really want to make enough to make a profit.
I mean, that's what a business is all about, is
making profits. So without profit, businesses don't really exist. And
then the content goes away. So unless we move to
a totally different model of the web, which probably be
one where we have to pay for everything we want
(31:34):
to access, everything would be behind a paywall, it would
be really hard to continue to have web content. We
have to have some financial means to support the content
or else the content goes away. Same thing is true
for podcasts. I mean, the reason we have sponsors is
to h to pay off the costs of producing these
(31:59):
shows and posting the shows and continue to develop shows
and make new shows. The ads support that, and hopefully
the ads that we are choosing to place with shows
are meaningful to our listeners, because if they're not, then
it's not really doing anyone any good. And ultimately, you
(32:22):
want the best possible relationship between content, advertising, and users.
You want something where everybody is happy with it, because otherwise,
what's the point. The same thing is true with the website,
so the tracking is very important to get that kind
of information. It's kind of funny to me because classic media,
(32:43):
your traditional media, things like television, magazines, newspapers, that kind
of stuff, everything that has advertising in it, Uh, it's
a lot harder to tell how well that advertising works,
how much impact that advertising has. With the exception of
stuff like the Super Bowl in the United States, where
people famously will tune in just to watch commercials, you
(33:06):
really don't know how much attention is being directed toward commercials.
You might be able to get some general ratings about
how well a certain television show has done, but that
doesn't really tell you anything about the ads themselves. So
it's funny to me that the traditional media, the advertising world,
(33:27):
is very comfortable in that space and in the online
space where we can actually see how well an ad
does because we can see how many people click on it,
how many people actually went through and said this is interesting,
I want to know more, I want to be able
to buy this. We can actually see how effective that is,
and somehow that makes it less valuable, uh in some cases,
(33:52):
like the CPMs that are demanded and in direct mail,
like sending stuff out in magazines and things that's way
higher than what you typically see for most online advertising. Um,
one of those things where a little knowledge can be dangerous.
I guess, very fascinating topic. And while you can go
(34:13):
through and do those extensions and use VPNs and things
and turn off a lot of the the elements that
will allow sites to track you, if you do that,
you also lose that of the benefits that tracking gives
to users. That might be a worthy trade off for
(34:34):
you if you really value your privacy and you don't
want sites to get access to that kind of information.
But UM, you know it's it's it's just this kind
of the way our online world works, and without some
sort of transformative change, I don't see that being any
different anytime soon. But it is an interesting subject. If
(34:57):
you guys have any ideas for future episodes, I any
sort of topic you want me to cover, whether it's
a technology, a company, a person in tech. Maybe there's
someone I should interview or have on as a guest host.
Send me a message. The email addresses tech stuff at
how Stuff works dot com or drop me a line
on Facebook or Twitter to handle it. Both of those
is tech stuff hs W. Don't forget. Head on over
(35:19):
to T public dot com slash tech stuff. That's T
e e Public dot com slash tech stuff to get
all your tech stuff merchandise needs. You know, maybe maybe
you're sitting there thinking, I have a cup of hot
coffee sitting here, but I have no mug to put
it in. Get yourself a tech stuff mug. They're pretty awesome.
(35:40):
I've got two of them myself, And don't forget to
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TechStuff News
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