References and Resources

For starters...

• Surya Mattu and Aaron Sankin at the Markup have a great write-up explaining how they built Blacklight, their real-time privacy inspector I referenced in the "Tracking the Trackers" section of the Immediate Personal Solutions page. In my opinion it also happens to be the best primer on online tracking today, it's accessible, concise and well researched.
• For a more academic take, this Princeton paper Online Tracking: A 1-million-site Measurement and Analysis by Steven Englehardt and Arvind Narayanan is also great.

In the "Alternatives to Surveillance Platforms" section of the Immediate Personal Solutions page of this site I discuss some of my personal privacy conscious app/platform choices, but I also mention that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to online privacy, we've all got different needs and challenges. So here are a few other great guides for your consideration...

• A DIY Guide to Feminist Cybersecurity by Noah Kelley
• Surveillance Self-Defense by the EFF
• Security in a Box by Tactical Technology Collective and Front Line Defenders

Learn More

Here's a list of references if you want to learn more about online tracking, the business of surveillance capitalism and the various issues associated with it. As I've mentioned in the other pages, this is by no means an authoritative list, this is just a small curated collection from my own personal research on the subject:

• (book) You Are Not A Gadget (2010) and Who Owns The Future (2012) by Jaron Lanier
• (book) Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (2015) by Bruce Schneier
• (book) Weapons of Math Destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy (2016) by Cathy O'Neil
• (book) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019) by Shoshana Zuboff
• (website) Me and My Shadow by Tactical Technology Collective
• (hypermedia documentary) Do Not Track (2015) by Brett Gaylor
• (documentary) Coded Bias (2020) by Shalini Kantayya
• (documentary) The Social Dilemma (2020) by Jeff Orlowski, Vickie Curtis and Davis Coombe

Sources

Below are a set of sources/references for the various claims I make in the my hypermedia essay howthey.watch/you:

• Uber has discovered they could use battery data to exploit you
• online trackers caught storing passwords that users typed into websites
• Facebook analyzing what you type even (especially) when you don't commit to the post or message.
• AI is now able to detect subtle signs of medical conditions like Parkinson's disease by recording your mouse movements or keystrokes
• information we don't even know we're sharing (Note to Self: the Bookie ~17:20)
• Facebook's sponsored posts and stories
• Facebook's troubling experiments and their "Trust Engineers"
• Facebook knows your in a new relationship even if you don't tell them
• what your mobile phone provider knows about you (project and talk)
• An Experiment in Hiring Discrimination Via Online Social Networks
• Tactical Technology Collective on digital profiling and digital scoring

Alternative Biz Models

Unimaginative folks in the industry often tell me that mass surveillance is the only sustainable business model for online services. This is not true, but does demonstrate a lack of interest or creativity on the part of these devs. I wasn't able to work this into the essay, but here are some interesting imaginative examples for alternative business models:

• Safiya Noble, author of Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, has spoken and written about how “we need new paradigms, not more new tech” and the role public institutions could play (what would a search engine look like if it was produced by a library rather than an advertising company?)
• The website of a Dutch broadcaster dropped third party cookies in favor of their own tracking-free ad server which turned out being more profitable for them. More privacy and more money.
• The open source and privacy conscious Brave browser has an opt-in feature where you can get paid in crypto currency to view "privacy-preserving" ads.
• Some online publications, like Creative Applications, have experimented with running web based crypto currency miners on user's computers when they visit their site. These sorts of crypto currency alternatives should be made transparent to visitors and they are admittedly a bit radical, but I always find radical ideas inspiring even when they're not necessarily practical.
• We can still also pay for subscriptions. It's an old model, but it's still viable. Consider the way ProtonMail's paid service also helps support their free tier for users who need email privacy but can't afford to pay for it.

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