Every time you connect to the Internet, hundreds of tech companies and advertisers are watching you.
Your personal data is being collected and sold by hundreds of companies, from tech startups to advertisers to data brokers. Your entire digital profile - where you live, what you buy, your medical history, the high school crush you're still following on Instagram - is for sale without your knowledge or consent. Why? Because they want to influence how you spend your time and money. They want to shape your world.
Find Out HowYour data is for sale
Your devices share data
Designed to manipulate
Networks are vulnerable
“What this [tracking] technology is really good at doing is following you from site to site…it knows when you come back, and it knows to look you up, and based on what it has profiled about you in the past, it will treat you accordingly and decide which advertisements to give you.”
Digital Trends“President Donald Trump signed legislation Monday killing privacy rules that would have required internet service providers to get your explicit consent before they share or sell your web browsing history and other sensitive information.”
NBC News“Jumpshot’s data comes from 100 million devices worldwide, whose users have downloaded free security software from partner Avast.”
Marketing Land“The Best VPN recently peeked under the hood of over 100 of the biggest VPN services. All told, 26 of them collect three or more important log files that could contain personal and identifying information — things like your IP address, location, bandwidth data, and connection timestamps.”
The Next Web“...computer scientists have developed new browser fingerprinting software that identifies users across Web browsers with a degree of accuracy that beats the most sophisticated single-browser techniques used today.”
IEEE Spectrum“Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps, including when they want to work on their belly fat or the price of the house they checked out last weekend….in many cases that data is being shared with someone else: Facebook Inc.”
The Wall Street Journal“As many CPAP users discover, the life-altering device comes with caveats: Health insurance companies are often tracking whether patients use them. If they aren’t, the insurers might not cover the machines or the supplies that go with them.”
ProPublica“‘...home networks can no longer be considered ‘trusted’ environments,’ says Noah Apthorpe, from Princeton University's computer science department.”
Wired“Granting an app permission to see photos on your device also lets that app see where you’ve been, because all of your pictures have geotags on them by default.”
Gizmodo“Voice-based devices like Amazon’s Echo and Google Home are always ‘awake,’ passively listening for commands to activate.”
Washington Post“Google's patent applications outline how audio and visual signals could be used to determine a speaker's mood or medical condition.”
CBS News“Amazon.com Inc. employs thousands of people around the world to help improve the Alexa digital assistant powering its line of Echo speakers. The team listens to voice recordings captured in Echo owners’ homes and offices.”
Bloomberg“Facebook’s news feed, for instance, runs on an algorithm that promotes whatever content wins the most engagement. Studies find that negative, primal emotions — fear, anger — draw the most engagement. So posts that provoke those emotions rise naturally.”
The New York Times“Facebook’s facial recognition options show users a bright blue box urging them to accept the company scanning their faces for its files, while the option to decline this scanning is hidden inside a page you only see by clicking ‘manage data settings.’”
Fortune“The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters...and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.”
The Guardian“[Researchers found] another half-billion IoT devices...that can be taken over with DNS rebinding attacks: "87 percent of switches, routers and access points; 78 percent of streaming media players and speakers; 77 percent of IP phones; 75 percent of IP cameras; 66 percent of printers; and 57 percent of smart TVs."
Boing Boing“Conversations with an internet-connected toy could let hackers snoop on your child's name, school, location, likes, dislikes and location, according to a [FBI] warning.”
NBC News“Since the beginning, antivirus software vendors have lied about their accuracy. Many claim 100 percent accuracy in detecting bad programs and we, despite nearly every computer being protected by an antivirus program, are still exploited by malware.”
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