A surprising amount of surveillance happens to us automatically, even if we do our best to opt out. It happens because we interact with others, and they’re being monitored.
Even if I never post or friend anyone on Facebook—I have a professional page, but not a personal account—Facebook tracks me. It maintains a profile of non-Facebook users in its database. It tracks me whenever I visit a page with a Facebook “Like” button.
It can probably make good guesses about who my friends are based on tagged photos, and it may well have the profile linked to other information it has purchased from various data brokers. My friends, and those sites with the Like buttons, allow Facebook to surveil me through them.
I try not to use Google search. But Google still collects a lot of information about the websites I visit, because so many of them use Google Analytics to track their visitors.
Again, those sites let Google track me through them. I use various blockers in my browser so Google can’t track me very well, but it’s working on technologies that will circumvent my privacy practices.
No doubt, tracking companies can join up the dots we leave behind, creating stable identifiers that can connect the data-trails from purchases, apps, devices, and clicks, creating a fantastically detailed picture of our lives built up our of these fragmentary details.
This is important because each little fragmentary disclosure can feel harmless to us at the time, but once they're merged into a unitary whole, the picture they from is disturbingly detailed.
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User account IDs of the large platforms such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft also play an important role in following people across the Internet.
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Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Roku assign "advertising IDs" to individuals, which are now widely used to match and link data from devices such as smartphones with other information from all over the digital world.
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Verizon uses its own identifier to track users across websites and devices.
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Some large data companies such as Acxiom, Experian, and Oracle have introduced globally unique IDs for people, which they use to link their decades-old consumer databases and other profile information from different sources with the digital world.
These corporate IDs mostly consist of two or more identifiers that are attached to different aspects of the online and offline life of someone and can be linked to each other in certain ways.
Identifiers used to track people across websites, devices and areas of life
Tracking companies also use more-or-less temporary identifiers, such as cookie IDs that are attached to users surfing the web.
Since users may disallow or delete cookies in their web browser, they have developed sophisticated methods to calculate unique digital fingerprints based on various attributes of someone's web browser and computer.
Similarly, companies compile fingerprints for devices such as smartphones. Cookie IDs and digital fingerprints are constantly synchronized between different tracking services, and then linked with other, more permanent identifiers.
This Article Was Written & published by Meena R, Senior Manager - IT, at Luminis Consulting Services Pvt. Ltd, India.
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