Track and Yield

by Julia Lipscomb

“If you’re getting great news or funny videos without paying, odds are someone is paying for your attention.” This is one of the fundamental truths of the attention economy explored in Do Not Track, a new seven-part series from documentary filmmaker Brett Gaylor about the way our personal data is collected, manipulated, sold, and deployed against us on the internet.

As much a web app as it is a documentary — and perhaps horror film? — Do Not Track shows viewers who agree to share their personal data via cookies a real-time look at how their identity is being tracked across the web. Its first two episodes premiere today; the rest of the series will roll out over the course of the next two months, wrapping up on June 9th.

I recently caught up with Gaylor, who was formerly the Senior Director of the Mozilla Foundation’s Webmaker initiative, on the phone to talk about just how intensely our movements are tracked across the web — and why even people who don’t have anything to hide should care just who winds up with their data.

Hi! So what motivated you to create Do Not Track?

When I first started on the web, it was a very fun place. Even the language at the time, like “surfing the web,” gave you a sense that you could go from link to link and find some eclectic piece of art or crazy philosophy page or weird store in a city you’ve never been to. That has changed a lot because advertising serves to consolidate the web. Advertising works for people who get big numbers; nobody wants to advertise on a page that nobody else will see. So how do you get those big numbers? You have to have on your webpage things that everybody likes. That, by definition, means that you will have less of the wonderful websites than you used to find. Then you layer on top of that these very large consolidated behemoths, like the Facebooks of the world or the modern media, the idea of personalization. We’ve replaced a lot of the gatekeepers that we used to have with broadcast models as the new gatekeepers.

The idea of personalization seems appealing, but it comes at the cost of having our personal data mined by all kinds of trackers — which people are vaguely aware of, but don’t really know how it’s done.

Let’s say you go from the New York Times to BuzzFeed — if those share the same advertising network, then both of those sites will be able to see that you went from this site to that site. Just extrapolate that over the course of the entire day. If you are someone like me and spend eight hours a day on the internet, there is an incredible volume of information collected that shows which sites you go to, what types of sites you prefer. You don’t necessarily need to know someone’s name to know who they are; you are very unique by these habits as you browse the web.

There is a famous case where this flashlight app was asking for people’s contacts. Why does a flashlight need your contacts? Why does Angry Birds need to know that unique device ID? Probably because they are selling that information to an advertising network. The other thing that I’m worried about is because there are these web startups competing with other web setups to basically build a database on what they can know about you. If you look at Pinterest, how do you think this business has valued in the billions of dollars?

In the first episode, danah boyd said that when you volunteer your data, it’s being used to assert power over people and monitor others who may be under constant surveillance. How does data tracking puts those people at risk?

Oftentimes when you talk to people about this issue, abstractly, they may be uncomfortable with data collection, but they assume that they are not criminals, or that they don’t have anything to hide. But only people in positions of privilege can make that statement. What Dana was saying was you really have to understand that you are a part of a system of data, so by being that person with nothing to hide and being complacent in the system, you’re not thinking about how that might affect someone who does have a good reason for their information to be kept private.

Some of the trackers discussed in Do Not Track are large corporations that people will recognize like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, but most you probably won’t recognize, right?

Who are these people? [laughs] It is a varied ecosystem. There a lot of different players. You have some folks who are called data brokers. The largest works for a company called Axiom. They combine large data sets and make those data sets available to paying customers. These companies are basically the evolution of direct mail marketing. The way that direct mail marketing worked in the past is they would manually [collect data] or purchase large sets of records about all kinds of things — people who own cars, people who own houses, people who have hunting licenses, people in the US who are registered Democrat or Republican — where people have volunteered their data or were required to do so under law. The data brokers purchase these data sets and sell them.

Whether or not these data brokers have information about you depends on where you live. In the US, Axiom has records on almost all American citizens. In Europe and Canada, regulations are more restrictive as to how much data they can collect about you.

Let’s go back to the idea that participation was what attracted people to the internet — that people are not just interested in being consumers, but creators. Is there hope for that ideal?

I am guilty of being a techno-utopian. Often people will describe the internet as if it had laws — “the internet was meant to be free” — but the internet is not free. The internet is whatever we want. There is room for all kinds of different webs, different internets. If you are a person who is interested in independence and serendipity, then what you need to do is support creators. You need to visit their websites, support them monetarily, and make choices about where you spend your time online.This is cheesy, but I do think it is similar to choices that we make in our food and diets. Often times you are going to have in your kitchen a bottle of ketchup. It doesn’t mean that ketchup is food that you should feed to your children regularly. You can augment it with food that is grown locally and organically. Sometimes that food costs more to buy; it is because it costs more to create and it is not made for everyone.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.