Making Choices about Privacy and Online Tracking
All of us are at least peripherally aware that various companies track our web usage habits. However, how many people are concerned enough to do something about it?
As it turns out, an increasing number of Internet users are. The number of people who say they opt out of targeted advertising has doubled year-over-year to 50 percent, while 90 percent of respondents said they used browser controls, like deleting cookies, to protect their privacy.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently outlined the steps that it recommends users take to safeguard their online privacy—steps that, while simple, represent a considerable tightening in privacy controls over a browser’s default settings and a significant concomitant reduction in the ability of companies to track users' online behavior.
Why bother? Much of the data collected via online behavioral tracking is said to be anonymous, in that it's not associated with your wallet name. However, because third-party cookies used by tracking sites uniquely identify you as a user, it's easy to link together all the information gathered about you. A single connection to your offline identity is all that's needed to complete the picture.
Moreover, whether your wallet name is tied to this information is increasingly irrelevant. Your activity online discloses an incredible amount of very personal information about you. Think about what you use the Internet for—shopping, work, news, checking the weather forecast, reading up on your hobbies, looking up health information, etc.
The picture formed of you by a website that tracks your browsing across all these different sites is shockingly intimate. Is that something that a faceless company should be entitled to know about you?
Companies are monitoring people in increasingly complex and interconnected ways, often without their informed consent. As software professionals, it's incumbent upon us to be aware of the privacy implications of the choices we make, especially because we are often the ones making those choices on behalf of our users.
