Protecting Your Online Privacy Everybody Wants To Track You & Nobody Wants To Get Tracked! Ram Parthasarathy @ramanujam ramanuj.me Saturday, November 9, 13
Dec 04, 2014
Protecting Your Online Privacy Everybody Wants To Track You &Nobody Wants To Get Tracked!
Saturday, November 9, 13
Privacy
Privacy is an individual’s right to control the collection, use and disclosure of
personal information
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Who Tracks You Online?
• Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
• Analytics Tools
• Ad serving companies
• Location based apps & services (run keeper, starbucks, yelp, groupon)
• ISPs, CDNs, Data brokers
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Saturday, November 9, 13
Why are you being tracked?
• Advertising is the backbone of many big internet services
• Providing you a better user experience
• Cheap and fast processing power and storage (Big Data!)
• Security & National Intelligence
• Spam, identity theft etc
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How is tracking done?
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Social Buttons
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HTTP Cookies & Flash Cookies
First Party Cookies
vs
Third Party Cookies
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Ever-cookies (aka Zombie Cookies)
Ad Tags & Pixels
iFrames
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How is this data used?
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Relevant Search Results - Good!
IP spoofed with a proxy
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Recommendations - Good!
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Info based on user action - Good!
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Excessive Ad Retargeting - Bad!
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Identity Theft, Selling data - Ugly!
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How Unique Are You ?
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How Unique Are You ?
33 Bits
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How Unique Are You ?
33 Bits
There are only 6.6 billion people in the world, so you only need 33 bits (more precisely, 32.6 bits) of information about a person to determine who they are.
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How Unique Are You ?
33 Bits
There are only 6.6 billion people in the world, so you only need 33 bits (more precisely, 32.6 bits) of information about a person to determine who they are.
- Arvind Narayanan, Princeton, http://33bits.org
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https://panopticlick.eff.org/Saturday, November 9, 13
How many trackers?
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What can YOU do?
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BUT...
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Really... What can YOU do?
Know and decide what you want to expose and what you don’t want to.
Choose the corresponding action.
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Some Common Methods
• The basic one - think for a second before you post something on the internet!
• Disable Javascript (Too aggressive!)
• Disable Third-Party cookies (Default on Safari. Firefox is trying to).
• Check Android App Permissions before you install.
• Use incognito mode.
• Use DuckDuckGo
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Browser Extensions
Ghosteryghostery.com
Disconnectdisconnect.me
ShareMeNotsharemenot.cs.washington.
edu/
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Thank You!Questions?
@ramanujam
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