Part 2: Surfing the Web
The internet is kind of an old technology now. When I was a kid in the 1980s, TV had only been in widespread use since the 1950s. The internet gained popularity in the 1990s and here we are 3 decades later. Unfortunately, the internet took a similar path to television: presenting content primarily paid for with advertising.
Before cable, satellite, and streaming, watching TV cost zero dollars. All you had to do was sit through a few 30-second occasionally entertaining commercials every 10 minutes and you could enjoy another thrilling episode of Gilligan’s Island. Then cable came along and, with options such as HBO, you could watch TV commercial-free! All you had to do was pay a monthly subscription.
The subscription model wasn’t that popular in the beginning. It was hard to beat free, even if free meant paying with your time and attention by sitting through a few commercials. When VCRs and then DVRs came out, people realized you could record shows and fast-forward through the commercials. Producers fought back by adding product placement to television shows. Not many are more famous than when a Junior Mint fell into an open chest cavity on Seinfeld. So much for skipping the commercials.
Fast-forward to the present-day and streaming services have taken over. People have become more comfortable with paying a monthly fee to Netflix and Disney to get commercial-free content. Although live TV broadcasting (sporting events and news) still remains largely commercial-supported.
Advertising on the Internet
Back in the early days of the internet, content builders made a critical choice. They decided to follow the revenue model that television and print media (think newspapers and magazines) had established. And so the banner ad was born. From then on, content on the internet would be mostly free, you just had to scroll past a few attention-grabbing advertisements as you read up on the latest movie reviews.
Watching the Watchers
In the early days of television companies like Nielson would sample a certain percentage of households to find out which shows people liked to watch. This helped determine the value of commercial slots. Highly rated shows attracted more eyeballs and therefore garnered a higher advertising price tag. However, Nielson only tracked the viewing habits of a small subset of volunteers. There was no practical way to track every television viewer. That is until the internet.
Instead of using samples, website owners count every single visitor. They record details such as how long a person lingers on a site, what pages are viewed the most, and what brought a person to the site. Based on these statistics, website owners sell ad space to companies. Advertising companies track how many people view an ad and click on an ad. But, in the early days of internet advertising, companies still had very little information about the identity of each individual who interacted with a website.
Who Are You?
Why show a 10-year-old kid with no money a picture of a miter saw on sale at Home Depot when his father who’s into woodworking might be more interested? Enter personalized advertising. Companies soon realized the internet provided a golden opportunity – find out who is staring at the screen and show them ads for products that interest them.
By the mid-2000s, Companies started building profiles of internet users by tracking which sites they visit. For example, a person might spend a lot of time on bird-watching sites. Combining this knowledge with marketing surveys might reveal that most bird watchers drive Toyota Highlanders. Bombard known bird watchers with Highlander ads and you’re click-through rate jumps and your advertising campaign becomes way more effective.
But that wasn’t enough. Soon free email services like Gmail and Yahoo were scraping inboxes to find out what people talk about with their friends. Credit card companies were cross-referenced to find out how much money you made. Online purchases, social media likes, contact lists, and phone GPS could all be discovered and used to identify each internet user. Pretty soon the internet knows more about you than your best friend.
A sample profile might be:
Joe is a bird watcher who bought a blue Toyota Highlander last year. He makes $80k per year living in Saratoga Springs, NY with a wife and three kids. Five days a week he commutes to Albany for work as a salesman at a small insurance company. He likely just learned he has a peanut allergy because his recent search history contains terms like: “peanut allergy in adults”, “peanut allergy symptoms”, and “EpiPen.”
New Age of Television
All this information was never available to television broadcasting companies, until now. Streaming services that serve you programming over the internet can use your online profile to suggest shows you might like. Which shows you watch are also tracked and used to enhance your online profile for advertisers to use when you surf the web or when you use a streaming service like Hulu or YouTubeTV that show you personalized ads.
Isn’t Personalization a Good Thing?
Advertisers would argue that by personalizing ads they’re doing internet users a favor. Why waste time eyeballing ads you’re not interested in? If you’re already thinking about buying a new car, why is it a bad thing the internet knows? Maybe Joe wants to update his Highlander and advertisers oblige by showing him an ad for $5,000 off MSRP. Doesn’t this make the economy more efficient? Perhaps. But shouldn’t consumers also have a say as to what information they want to reveal to companies?
How much are your time and attention worth? Even if you think of yourself as impervious to the gentle nudge of advertising, why subject yourself to the possibility that you’ve subconsciously been influenced to buy a Toyota over a Honda or worse, to buy a car at all when you’re perfectly happy taking the subway or riding your bike? Why allow advertising to occupy so many hours of your week. Unlike money, time is the most valuable resource you can never get back.
Limiting Exposure
While 100% privacy on the web is nearly impossible, there are things you can do to greatly reduce your exposure to trackers and advertising.
Beginner
- Use privacy-focused browsers: Firefox, Brave, or Duck Duck Go (mobile only).
- Use a privacy-focused search engine: Duck Duck Go or Startpage
- Visit more sites that don’t show ads, but instead ask for donations or micro-payments in exchange for content or services.
- Opt-out of tracking when you can. Go into your Google or Apple preferences and turn off as much as you want.
- Be mindful about giving away personal information online.
Intermediate
- Install browser extensions: Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin, HTTPS everywhere
- Use a Virtual Private Network (VPN).
- Use Tor Browser to obfuscate your online activity.
Advanced
- Install Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi to block ads and trackers at the network level.
- De-google your life.
Part 2: Surfing the Web
Tags: digital privacy privacy security