In someways, searching the internet with Lightbeam turned on is like watching a Hollywood movie come to life, everyone is watching!\u00a0 Recently, I have overheard conversations about our smart phones listening to us and people being afraid that there is some old codger sitting behind a mahogany desk in a dark room chuckling to himself in a maniacal way as the data about us all gathers on his screen.<\/p>\n
It was really interesting to watch the data collect on Lightbeam.\u00a0 I wasn’t surprised that there are servers that track people who connect to particular sights.\u00a0 I am sure that in most cases it is driven by economic motives.\u00a0 I had expected that the sites would independently gather information.\u00a0 What was a little more shocking to watch was the development of interconnected webs which appeared.\u00a0 Doing a youtube search connected instragram and a Craigslist search that I had done which had previously been separate.<\/p>\n
This activity was helpful as I was talking with my son who is in Grade 9 and starting a 1-to-1 computer program at his school.\u00a0 We were discussing some of the important foundational ideas around digital citizenship.\u00a0 He was rather unnerved to see that there were third parties tracking our internet activity.\u00a0 It was a good connection to demonstrate that the darker the site on the internet, the more devious those trackers could potentially be, both for his health and the health of his computer.<\/p>\n
I have definitely been more careful about good internet practices like logging out and closing windows and browsers.\u00a0 I have also been curious to see if my browser settings can be adjusted to make my internet experiences less of an invasive experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In someways, searching the internet with Lightbeam turned on is like watching a Hollywood movie come to life, everyone is watching!\u00a0 Recently, I have overheard conversations about our smart phones listening to us and people being afraid that there is some old codger sitting behind a mahogany desk in a dark room chuckling to himself […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":350,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,16,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digitalliteracy","category-tracking-the-trackers","category-twu-online","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/principalmorrow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/principalmorrow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/principalmorrow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/principalmorrow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/350"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/principalmorrow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/principalmorrow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/principalmorrow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions\/104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/principalmorrow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/principalmorrow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/principalmorrow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}