{"id":47,"date":"2018-09-23T22:26:04","date_gmt":"2018-09-24T05:26:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/monicagrace\/?p=47"},"modified":"2018-09-23T22:26:04","modified_gmt":"2018-09-24T05:26:04","slug":"tracking-the-trackers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/monicagrace\/2018\/09\/23\/tracking-the-trackers\/","title":{"rendered":"Tracking the Trackers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-48\" src=\"http:\/\/create.twu.ca\/monicagrace\/files\/2018\/09\/Screen-Shot-2018-09-23-at-10.03.50-PM-300x212.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"212\" srcset=\"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/monicagrace\/files\/2018\/09\/Screen-Shot-2018-09-23-at-10.03.50-PM-300x212.png 300w, https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/monicagrace\/files\/2018\/09\/Screen-Shot-2018-09-23-at-10.03.50-PM-768x543.png 768w, https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/monicagrace\/files\/2018\/09\/Screen-Shot-2018-09-23-at-10.03.50-PM-1024x724.png 1024w, https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/monicagrace\/files\/2018\/09\/Screen-Shot-2018-09-23-at-10.03.50-PM-676x478.png 676w, https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/monicagrace\/files\/2018\/09\/Screen-Shot-2018-09-23-at-10.03.50-PM.png 1468w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">This has been my favourite exercise so far, but it was pretty frightening to be honest!<\/p>\n<p>I always knew sites were tracking my data, but did not know it was to this extent. Also didn&#8217;t know so much of it is without my permission and from sites I am not aware of. I did this exercise for about 15 minutes and the image above was what happened on the Firefox extension: Lightbeams. I went on some of my regular sites I browse: Facebook, eventbrite (mostly for work), instagram, spotify and youtube in that order. The following are some of my observations and comments on the process and findings:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Going on eventbrite to an event I&#8217;m managing for work, increased the trackers a lot! However, I was warned when I opened eventbrite though about cookies and asked if I will accept them. To people who don&#8217;t know what cookies are though, they might ignorantly accept them.<\/li>\n<li>Surprisingly Instagram seemed to have a lot less trackers than I thought. However, if I had clicked on some &#8220;ads&#8221; or &#8220;promo&#8221; it probably would have gone up more.<\/li>\n<li>Facebook, youtube and spotify&#8217;s trackers were pretty high as well.<\/li>\n<li>Facebook&#8217;s amount of trackers did not surprise me.<\/li>\n<li>Spotify and Youtube&#8217;s did suprise me, but when I thought about it more it makes sense. Spotify feeds you music based on your preferences. Youtube is similar, feeding you videos they think you&#8217;d like, based on what you usually watch.<\/li>\n<li>I usually use Safari for normal browsing, but I couldn&#8217;t find how long they keep cookies for. I did find out that Safari allows you to block cookies if you change your settings in preferences. When this option is on, each time Safari gets content from a website, they place a request not to track you. This sounds good, but the trouble is, it&#8217;s an honours system. This means, it is up to the website to honour this request and that is pretty sketchy! I doubt many website heed this request, because as far as I know ethics in this field is still grey and there seems to be a lot of money in tracking.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This has been my favourite exercise so far, but it was pretty frightening to be honest! I always knew sites were tracking my data, but did not know it was to this extent. Also didn&#8217;t know so much of it is without my permission and from sites I am not aware of. I did this [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":445,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digital-literacy","category-tracking","category-twu-online","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/monicagrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/monicagrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/monicagrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/monicagrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/445"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/monicagrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/monicagrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/monicagrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions\/49"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/monicagrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/monicagrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/monicagrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}