Posted on July 3, 2023
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Podcast article available here.
Strange times, our personal lives attract covetousness. However, it is strictly private, but since the advent of the internet and computers, our smallest actions and gestures in our online lives can be tracked.
Gallimard knows nothing of our readings. Amazon knows all of our purchases and is watching us when we’re on their Kindle e-reader. Universal doesn’t know our taste in music. Spotify knows every second of listening. The bartender doesn’t care about our conversations with friends. Facebook analyzes them all.
With a large part of our lives going digital, our privacy has become a battle between rapists and privacy advocates.
We will analyze the different players and the data business on the internet. For those who want to protect their privacy, I invite you to watch one of my videos on the subject.
privacy violators
marketing
Of course we think of Facebook, Google or Microsoft. Together they manage the most important messages sent over the Internet using Messenger, WhatsApp, Gmail and Outlook. They own 84% of the world’s smartphones with Android and 75% of the computers with Windows and ChromeOS. They control the major social networks including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. You even have the right to view our documents with Office or GSuite.
It is already huge and yet it remains the tip of the iceberg.
First, BigTech spies on our movements outside of their locations. Google has Google Analytics, a module that is installed on a third-party website to analyze traffic and, in turn, allow Google to spy on visits to the website. The site manager can see the metrics of his visits.
Google Analytics is installed on 80% of websites, allowing Google to monitor 80% of the internet. Not to mention the Google Chrome browser, which is said to allow monitoring the remaining 20%.
Facebook is not to be outdone: it also offers a module to be installed on websites, the Facebook pixel. This component becomes a cookie to analyze the traffic of the websites on which it is present.
Second, alongside BigTech, there are thousands of companies that collect our data, resell it, and then auction it off.
Yes, you read that right, our data is auctioned off every time you visit a website.
For example, you surf the Internet looking for your next vacation. Your entire trip is analyzed, a marketing profile circulates with you on the internet (80% male, 60% CSP+, 90% holiday search).
On each page visited, this profile is auctioned off (programmatic advertising), robots fight for a few milliseconds on behalf of advertisers. In your case, a fight between Hotels.com and Trivago.com. In the end, the winner has the right to display their advertisement in front of your eyes.
This entire process is repeated on each website between the ad and the ad showing.
Mercenary 2.0
So far we have stayed in the marketing area. There are also internet surveillance companies in the service of governments, mercenaries of digital 2.0.
The company Palantir proposes to analyze the huge data of citizens online for the states, a kind of turnkey NSA. The French government uses it and even the UK’s NHS has used its services during the Corona crisis.
Also worth mentioning is NSO with its Pegasus software. It is used to hack someone’s phone. Their purpose, of course, is to hunt down terrorists and pedophiles. He has still not been able to locate Epstein’s clients. But it has already been used at least 50,000 times to spy on journalists and human rights activists like Ahmed Mansoor or even politicians. Morocco used this software to spy on Macron’s phone.
the defenders
There are real players who fight for our private lives, be it associations like EFF in the US, la Quadrature du Net and Framasoft in France; or companies like Proton, which offers a fully encrypted competitor to Gmail and Drive.
Again: for those who want more details about the applications and tools to protect their privacy, I refer to my video on the subject.
But some companies, such as Apple, question this. On paper, Apple wants to be an anti-Google. Their business model is based on selling products and services to consumers and not on collecting data.
On the one hand, Apple gives itself the means to do this: T2 security chips and biometric sensors on all devices to encrypt them and make them more secure; frequent updates and bug bunty to avoid bugs; Implementation of end-to-end encryption in various applications to prevent the propagation of data in plain text on its servers; Better framing and limiting tracking of third party applications in the AppStore.
On the other hand, Apple remains a closed company, its devices are difficult to test. The company claims the collection of data in the AppStore and the stock market app. In the Snowden case, she worked well with the NSA. The FBI asks him to remove the encryption. China urges him to remove apps that can help protesters.
Does Apple do everything it can to protect our privacy, or is it based on a simple marketing argument?
In any case, for some companies the question no longer arises.
The company Qwant wanted to be a French Google that respects privacy. After 25 million EU investments, the product remains shaky, too dependent on Bing. While other similar solutions like DuckDuckGo or Brave Search have emerged. Worse, the high salary of its leaders has been announced while the box is still not winning a round. Despite the influx of public funds, her situation is such that she borrowed 8 million euros from Huawei to avoid bankruptcy.
After all, its founder just left to start a cyber surveillance company. Qwant’s credibility is severely compromised. It looks like a company is collecting grants for “noble causes.”
Diploma
There’s no point in pointing fingers at any actor or platform, especially Tiktok. The entire Internet violates your privacy, spread across thousands of actors!
The most important actor is also missing. In a future article we will see what role the states play in this matter of our private lives.
The article was originally published on January 20, 2023.