Watching the Internets watch you

At the iSchool, we talk a lot about personal privacy and online tracking and the like. Classmates have talked about exclusively using private browsing, obsessively clearing their history and cookies, or using ‘uncommon’ browsers that disallow all the tracking that goes on as one typically surfs the internets. I’ve not generally been so concerned: I’m alright with companies  like Google or Facebook collecting my data, labeling me as a 20-something techno-savvy university graduate who likes tea and knitting and targeting my ads. I am interested in how people react to being tracked, however, so when Paul Reinheimer directed me to Collusion, a super neat plugin for Firefox that helps you visualise who is tracking you, and how they share their data, I was instantly sucked in.

Playing around with Collusion showed me just how ubiquitous doubleclick.net is, and made me recognize that gossip websites like perez hilton or ‘women’s’ websites like xojane.com are incredibly connected to ad networks. In contrast, Google is way less connected, sharing  less (but sucking in more). In light of the hoopla surrounding the alleged dodgyness of Google’s ‘new’ privacy policy, Collusion may prompt more productive discussions. From a more academic point of view, it would be interesting to see how seeing who is watching while you browse affects people’s behaviour online. For anyone who’s interested in internet privacy, it’s a fun (and distracting) supplement to normal browsing.

It’s also fun to see how many weird connections you can make. To wit: Paul’s tweet.