The Internet Is Spying On You - Middle School Reading Article Worksheet (Page 2 of 5) in pdf

Vale Middle School – Reading Article

THE INTERNET IS SPYING ON YOU

Notes on my thoughts,

Who’s doing the spying?

reactions and questions as I

Marketers, advertisers, and those whose businesses depend on them. Most

read:

websites install their own cookies and beacons, both to make site navigation easier

and to gather user information. (Wikipedia is a rare exception.) But third parties—

advertisers and the networks that place online ads, such as Google and iAds—

frequently pay site hosts to install their own tracking technology. Beacons are even

sometimes planted without the knowledge of the host site. Comcast, for example,

installed Flash cookies on computers visiting its website after it accepted

Clearspring Technologies’ free software for displaying slide shows. Visitors who

clicked on a slide show at wound up loading Clearspring’s Flash

cookies onto their hard drives, which Comcast said it had never authorized.

How is personal data used?

It’s collected and sold by companies like Clearspring. Such information can be sold

in large chunks—for example, an advertiser might pay $1 for 1,000 profiles of movie

lovers—or in customized segments. An apparel retailer might buy access to 18-

year-old female fans of the Twilight movie series who reside in the Sunbelt. “We

can segment it all the way down to one person,” says Eric Porres of Lotame, which

sells these profiles. Advertisers use the profiles to deliver individualized ads that

follow users to every site they visit. Julia Preston, a 32-year-old software designer

from Austin, recently saw how this works firsthand when she started seeing lots of

Web ads for fertility treatments. She had recently researched uterine disorders

online. “It’s unnerving,” she says.

Is all this snooping legal?

So far, yes. While an e-commerce site can’t sell to third parties the credit card

numbers it acquires in the course of its business, the legality of various tracking

technologies—and the sale of the personal profiles that result—has never been

tested in court. Privacy advocates say that’s not because there aren’t abundant

abuses, but because the law hasn’t kept pace with advancing technology. “The

relevant laws,” says Lauren Weinstein of People for Internet Responsibility, an

advocacy group, “are generally so weak—if they exist at all—that it’s difficult to file

complaints.”

Can you avoid revealing yourself online?

Aside from abandoning the Internet altogether, there’s virtually no way to evade

prying eyes. Take the case of Ashley Hayes-Beaty, who learned just how exposed

she was when The Wall Street Journal shared what it had learned about her from a

data miner. Hayes-Beaty’s computer use identified her as a 26-year-old female

Nashville resident who counts The Princess Bride and 50 First Dates among her

favorite movies, regularly watches Sex and the City, keeps current on entertainment

news, and enjoys taking pop-culture quizzes. That litany, which advertisers can buy

for about one-tenth of a cent, constitutes what Hayes-Beaty calls an “eerily precise”

consumer profile. “I like to think I have some mystery left to me,” says Hayes-Beaty,

“but apparently not.”

How to fight back against data miners

There are ways to minimize your exposure to data miners. One of the most effective

is to disrupt profile-building by clearing your computer browser’s cache and deleting

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