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Journalism of Courage
By Nishant Shah
At some point or the other, some well-intentioned person must have warned you about putting your public information on social media. The world is full of stalkers, they must have said. You never know who will use it and for what purpose. We have shaped our online social behaviour living in fear of all the things that can go wrong. Largely, it has been the fear of people, weirdos who will do harm if they can because we know that information is the new currency, and just like we wouldn’t leave our money lying in the open, we need to safeguard information as well. In this deep-seated suspicion of people and the fear of what they might do to us if they got hold of our private data, we have designed our online lives to feel safe. We use multiple passwords, we protest against social media privacy tools that do not allow us to control who sees the information we put out, and we often use encryption softwares and malware software to protect ourselves from attacks. Most of us do not spend many hours worrying about our online data and information, and feel that we have taken the basic precautions to make sure that the peeping tom or the imaginary hacker cannot really get to us.
And it is good to take these safety measures. Except that there is one fundamental flaw in there. All these are steps we take in order to protect ourselves from other individuals, connected with us on the digital networks through our multiple devices. But the biggest stalker on the internet is not really a person. In the world of growing networks, the thing that watches you, listens to you, keeps a track of every move you make, records every transaction you enter into, and pays you close attention to is not human. It is a combination of software, tracker cookies, predictive algorithms, big data analysis programmes, and digital databases, where there is a unique file, just for you, accruing endless information about you, storing, sorting and sifting through it to build a profile which can then be exposed to customised advertisements, offers and even potential dating partners. As we grow more paranoid of the imaginary person who is rubbing his hand, waiting for us to lapse so that they can steal our credit card statements or make pornographic videos of our intimate moments, we forget that in the age of ubiquitous computing, we are constantly being watched, and not only by human beings.
Cookies, a piece of software that resides in your computer browser, collect information of the different websites that you visit, and the kind of things that you do there. Cookies are installed by the web companies, which offer you free services, because you are the product. Cookies collect granular information ranging from your age, location, language and operating systems, and share this information across the multiple platforms that you encounter. Which is why, once you click on an advertisement for new shoes on Amazon, the advert follows you. You might be chatting with your friends on Facebook, or searching for a new book on Google, or catching up for news on your news aggregator. In all these multi-tasked activities, you will see the same ad following you, enticing you, letting you know that just because you have moved on doesn’t mean the relationship is over. Like an obsessive stalker, the cookies allow for these ads to jump from one page to another, just in case you change your mind.
While that example seems innocuous and just another form of advertising, we need to realise that it opens up a can of worms . Because cookies share information between multiple websites, they override your own discrete personalities, avatars and settings, and converge your multiple profiles. Cookies undermine your choices and settings and betray your multiple interests to companies that you might not divulge that information to. Would you, for example, like your bank to know about all the transactions you are making? Would you be comfortable knowing that your health insurance provider knows the details of your online shopping cart? Would you like your professional network to know your dating profile on OkCupid, or your Facebook friends to know about your political groups? Cookies might not give your personally identifiable data to other individuals, but they constantly leak your data to other companies and services, creating a seamless web from which it is almost impossible to escape. So the next time, you sign up for a free service, remember that you are not just the consumer, but the consumed. We need to think of privacy, not only from each other, but also from the giant corporations that are mining, harvesting, sharing and exploiting data about us in ways that we cannot begin to imagine.
Nishant Shah is director (research), Centre for Internet and Society
