Friday, 8 July 2016

I'll Be Watching You

The amount of people tracking your every day movements is staggering ..... you walk down the street tracked by CCTV cameras. You go into the office and you swipe cards everywhere to get around. You drive your car and the GPS is tracking you. Your phone is talking non-stop to your Phone and Internet providers .....

Your Watched Everywhere These Days
Your Watched Everywhere These Days ....

So from the moment you leave the house, to the moment you go home, your every step is counted and watched by many shadowy figures ....

So where's the private area? In your house? Nope .... most TV's are WiFi connectible these days (as are many other appliances such as smart heat controls and fridges), and these are all trackable for activity as much as your phone. Even older TV's give some sort of indication of being on, and what channel is being watched (as anyone who fell foul of the BBC TV detector vans would be able to attest). Phones and tablets of course, continue to broadcast your activities even when you are home, as does your PC or laptop.

Then there is perhaps the most pernicious of all the tracking .... the web browsers. Web site spying (both legal via Cookies or illegal via Key logging), is big big business. So there you are reading this site and numerous people are aware of your activates. If you ever look at the cookies file on your PC you will find hundreds or thousands of these little information packets. If you have never looked then for the Windows Internet Explorer browser look at this. Each of the other major browsers (FireFox and Chrome) also allow you to look and edit cookies. Now I should point out that these are mostly harmless and some are useful, but many are tracking and reporting on your activities.

A recent study of the million most popular web sites has indicated that more than 81,000 tracking cookies are currently operating on the web .... they are mostly used to show targeted adverts when you land on web sites, and these trackers share information amongst dozens of firms. Also the manner in which they track you personally are evolving i.e. some are now checking what fonts your PC uses, in order to help 'fingerprint' particular users.

But the fact that surprised most researchers about all these tracking attempts is that 'News Websites' proved to have the most trackers transferred to your PC while adult content sites have amongst the fewest.

Who would have guessed?

2 comments:

  1. The information that can be gleaned from Browser activity is nothing compared to that which some users will post themselves or give freely when simply asked.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Not a problem .... Nigeria has best security experts on earth. They told me so when they rang last week. They will look after my details until its safe.

      Delete

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