Name: 【TED】Gary Kovacs: Tracking the trackers
Uploaded: 2015-11-04T02:34:44.000Z
Duration: 6 min 41 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Translator: Timothy Covell Reviewer: Morton Bast

Adverbs of manner

I don't know why, but I'm continually amazed to think

that two and a half billion of us around the world

are connected to each other through the Internet

more than 30 percent of the world's population

can go online to learn, to create and to share.

And the amount of time each of us is spending doing all of this

is spending over eight hours a day online.

But just as the Internet has opened up the world for each and every one of us,

it has also opened up each and every one of us to the world.

And increasingly, the price we're being asked to pay

Today, what many of us would love to believe

is that the Internet is a private place; it's not.

And with every click of the mouse and every touch of the screen,

leaving breadcrumbs of our personal information

everywhere we travel through the digital woods.

We are leaving our birthdays, our places of residence,

our financial histories, and on and on it goes.

I'm not for one minute suggesting that sharing data is a bad thing.

In fact, when I know the data that's being shared

I want some sites to understand my habits.

It helps them suggest books for me to read

But when I don't know and when I haven't been asked,

In fact, there's an entire industry formed

around following us through the digital woods

they can do almost whatever they want with it.

This is an area today that has very few regulations

Except for some of the recent announcements here in the United States and in Europe,

it's an area of consumer protection that's almost entirely naked.

So let me expose this lurking industry a little bit further.

The visualization you see forming behind me is called Collusion

that you can install in your Firefox browser

that helps you see where your Web data is going and who's tracking you.

that I have not navigated to, but are following me.

The blue dots are the sites that I've actually navigated directly to.

And the gray dots are sites that are also tracking me,

All of them are connected, as you can see,

So let me go from an example to something very specific and personal.

I installed Collusion in my own laptop two weeks ago

and I let it follow me around for what was a pretty typical day.

I actually start my day going online and checking email.

I then go to a news site, look for some headlines.

And in this particular case I happened to like one of them

on the merits of music literacy in schools

Our daughter then joined us at the breakfast table,

and I asked her, "Is there an emphasis on music literacy in your school?"

And she, of course, naturally as a nine-year-old,

looked at me and said quizzically, "What's literacy?"

So I sent her online, of course, to look it up.

and there are already nearly 25 sites that are tracking me.

So let me fast-forward through the rest of my day.

I log onto a few more social sites, I blog,

I check more news reports, I share some of those news reports,

pretty typical day -- in this case, actually fairly pedantic --

and at the end of the day, as my day winds down,

that are now tracking my personal information,

I look at this picture and it freaks me out.

This is nothing. I am being stalked across the Web.