Irreal

Because I live in the United States, I grew up with the notion that TV would provide me “content” for free in exchange for embedding advertisements in that content. It’s always seemed fair and reasonable to me so I’ve resisted the urge to install an ad blocker in my browser. After all, I enjoy and profit from the works that people put on the Internet so it’s only fair that I pay for them with the accompanying ads.

That doesn’t mean, however, that I’ve signed up to be a pushover. Annoy me enough and I’ll learn to forego your contributions. For example, if you autoplay a video advertisement when I enter your site, I’m gone as soon as it starts and I won’t be back. There are, it turns out, much worse things than autoplay videos and they’re mostly invisible and easy to overlook.

I’m talking about the tracking ads and beacons that go by the generic name of adtech. If you want the scales to fall from your eyes, install something like Ghostery or Privacy Badger in your browser and see what happens. It will, I promise you, make your hair stand on end. Some sites are pushing over 20 tracking beacons to your browser all of which are tracking you across the Internet. Some are being reused by the NSA to track “people of interest.”

It’s even worse on mobile where all this extra cruft uses up your expensive bandwidth and depletes your battery charge. Dean Murphy, the developer of Crystal, an iOS 9 app that blocks tracking ads and beacons, has run some benchmarks. He finds that blocking trackers makes pages load 3.9 times faster and use 53% less bandwidth.

Plugins like Ghostery, Privacy Badger, or Crystal seem like an ideal solution to me because they don’t block ads per se, only tracking ads so you’re keeping faith with the content providers as long as they don’t abuse your trust. Sadly, the content providers are getting ripped off by adtech too. Don Marti explains adtech fraud in an excellent post that shows how content providers and advertisers are getting ripped off while we users are having our privacy violated. You really should read it but the TL;DR is that the adtech vultures drop a tracking cookie on you when you visit a high quality site such as The Atlantic but actually serve the ad when you visit a low quality site with cheaper ad rates: collect your interests in the high rent neighborhoods but sell you the goods in the sketchier parts of town.

As I said at the beginning, I don’t mind ads but that doesn’t mean that I’m open to having my behavior tracked by mostly unsavory ad networks that feel entitled to run arbitrary scripts on my computer without my knowledge or consent. Until they clean up their act, Ghostery will block their privacy invading scripts. Marco Arment says that even if some publishers experience difficulties that doesn’t mean we’re obligated to let them romp through our machines. I agree. Send me non-tracking ads and I’ll see them. Otherwise, your ads are going right into the bit bucket unread and unexecuted.

By way of the Macalope’s John Evans putdown, I came across this old but still true and relevant article by Marcy Wheeler over at Salon entitled America’s huge iPhone lie: Why Apple is being accused of coddling child molesters. The article starts by noting that encryption hardly ever plays a roll in FBI cases (only four times last year) and that much of what law enforcement has to say on the matter amounts to lies.

Wheeler also points out that a substantial part of the “lost information” resulting from encryption on smart phones is obtainable elsewhere. For example, one complaint is that the recent location data collected by the iPhone is unavailable on encrypted phones but is available from the phone carriers because the phones log onto cell sites and thereby reveal their location.

Although law enforcement assures us that their concern is about being able to access data for which they’ve obtained a warrant, Wheeler’s article suggests that, in fact, their concern is about losing access to data for which they don’t have a warrant, and therefore a right, to see. Wheeler says the real issue is that the encryption makes it harder to do searches without getting a warrant for which they often don’t have sufficient evidence.

She says

If law enforcement wants to retain this access, they should be honest about what they might lose and why every iPhone user should be asked to carry a phone that is susceptible to criminal targeting as a result.

She makes the final point that smart phone encryption offers real benefits to everyone, not just pedophiles, and that the government should recognize that and stop pretending Apple is benefiting only law breakers. It’s a good article and definitely worth reading.

New AT&T/NSA docs show "We were treated as crazy for years for allegations that we now know are substantially true.” https://t.co/R8TSG6Figr

— Julia Angwin (@JuliaAngwin) August 17, 2015