{"id":1377,"date":"2018-03-21T21:10:47","date_gmt":"2018-03-22T04:10:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/frommyperch\/?p=116"},"modified":"2018-03-21T21:10:47","modified_gmt":"2018-03-22T04:10:47","slug":"reflections-on-tracking-the-trackers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/reflections-on-tracking-the-trackers\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on Tracking the Trackers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIf we would have our creations be true, beautiful, and good, we have to attend to our hearts.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

These words come from computer pioneer Frederick P. Brooks, who joined IBM in 1956 and was a chief designer of the IBM 360 operating system. I was intrigued when I first read about him in the 2013 IVP publication Shaping a Digital World<\/em> by Derek C. Schuurman. To become more familiar with Brooks, I watched the 7-minute YouTube video \u201cFred Brooks–Computer Pioneer\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/a> by Kevin Bryan.<\/p>\n

I doubt that Brooks was able to predict the future of digital technology in the early days of IBM, but I consider his advice to be especially applicable to this week\u2019s issue of the invasion of privacy by \u201cpirates\u201d who track, analyze, and sell information but in so doing risk harming their sources. I believe this issue requires us all to \u201cattend to our hearts.\u201d I am confident that people like Brooks were hoping to make the world a better place by their innovations, and that they never intended the harm caused by today\u2019s trackers. I look forward to our discussions about ethical standards in the Digital Literacy segment of our course!<\/p>\n

My two-day experience with \u201cLightbeam\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

On Monday, March 20, I installed the Lightbeam<\/em> extension. I had an inkling, based on previous experience, that the New York Times would likely result in an explosion of third party attention. Sure enough, after only one brief visit to read a Times article, I opened Lightbeam and there were 80 trackers! Then I accessed Freely, a YouTube video and other sites associated with our course\u20146 sites in all\u2014whereupon the number of trackers increased to 156!<\/p>\n

Today, while experimenting with various buttons on the Firefox<\/em> and Google Chrome<\/em> search engines, I found a few extensions and add-ons that, I hoped, would help block some unwanted tracking. AdBlocker<\/em> seemed especially interesting to me. Then I \u201creset\u201d Lightbeam<\/em> and visited several course-related sites. This time, after visiting 7 sites, I saw only 56 third-party connections, and even after visiting 10 sites, the total number of third-party connections was still only 68!<\/p>\n

I wonder if the sites I visited the second day were \u201csafer,\u201d or if the Facebook fiasco is already having some effect. . . Frankly, I am distressed by the news that the Facebook accounts of 50 million Americans were unknowingly hacked before the 2016 election. We are all well advised to treat the information we post to the Web with care.<\/p>\n

Let me share two questions about Internet security that concern me as an online instructor<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

1 \u2013 It became obvious to me while working with Lightbeam<\/em> that those of us who have a longer history of blogging to the Web also have more information in cyberspace that they might want to \u201ctake back\u201d by retrieving it and erasing it. Is this even possible? I read today that it takes 90 days to delete a Facebook account and there is no guarantee that everything will be deleted. I hope to learn more about what will happen to blogs posted to the course hub after a course has been completed.<\/p>\n

2 \u2013 Thanks to one of my students, I became familiar last year with Feedly, Google Drive, Google Docs, Sheets<\/em>, and Slides<\/em>. I wonder how secure these programs are\u2014can the teams using them be confident that what\u2019s private stays private? If so, I wonder if they might be preferred in K-12 settings–or perhaps within MA Lead–to annotation and problem-solving tools such as\u00a0hypothes.is\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0GitHub,<\/em> which are open to participants around the globe.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“If we would have our creations be true, beautiful, and good, we have to attend to our hearts.” These words […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":247,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,22,63,7,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digital-literacy","category-flow","category-ma-lead-faculty","category-tracking","category-twu-online","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8GjXS-md","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/247"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1377"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1588,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1377\/revisions\/1588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}