Daniel Neyland (Management School, Lancaster University)
UCL Science & Technology studies seminar
Monday 5 March, 2012 - 17:00

Deletion appears to be a routine, taken for granted aspect of our everyday lives. However, despite numerous studies of the ‘everyday,’ little close social science scrutiny has been given to the nature of deletion. What does it mean to press delete? What happens to deleted information? What are the consequences of deletion and for whom?

The importance of deletion as a socio-political issue has become more pointed in recent years with increasing discussion of the ‘right to be forgotten’. In particular, this ‘right’ has risen to prominence in discussions and deliberations involving the re-drafting of the EU Data Protection Act. Suggestions have been made that organisations such as state funded surveillance systems which have traditionally stored huge amounts of data, could switch to a default position of deleting.

However, this move to forgetting through deleting raises a range of profound ethical and practical problems. What should be deleted and how?

In what ways would deletion impact upon security? Is deletion an ethical step up from default storage of information? This presentation provides an ethnographic answer to these questions. It reports on two social scientists’ work on a project to design, build and market a new ‘ethical’ surveillance system based on default deleting of video footage. The presentation will look at the development and testing of this system and the role played by social scientists in assessing the ethics of deleting.

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks”

Jeff Hammerbacher, quoted in This Tech Bubble is Different by Ashlee Vance, Business Week.14 April 2011.

I’m Being Followed: How Google—and 104 Other Companies—Are Tracking Me on the Web
Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic, 29 Feb 2012.

1. Using Mozilla’s tool Collusion to find out how many companies are tracking him online (105).

2. How the online advertising ecosystem is structured - basically:

• Helping advertisers buying adspace, e.g. media planning & buying (green, on left)
• Helping sellers of adspace, mostly to deliver particular types of people (blue, on right)
• Delivering more data or faster service or better measurement (orange)

3. A detailed look at three of these companies & what they actually do:

All three companies want to know as much about me and what’s on my screen as they possibly can, although they have different reasons for their interest. None of them seem like evil companies, nor are they singular companies. Like much of this industry, they seem to believe in what they’re doing. They deliver more relevant advertising to consumers and that makes more money for companies. They are simply tools to improve the grip strength of the invisible hand.

4. You can’t stop data collection. Opt-out tools stop you from receiving targeted ads - they don’t stop data being collected.

5. Why data is still collected - mostly for advertising performance management:

But the NAI code also recognizes that companies sometimes need to continue to collect data for operational reasons that are separate from ad targeting based on a user’s online behavior. For example, online advertising companies may need to gather data to prove to advertisers that an ad has been delivered and should be paid for; to limit the number of times a user sees the same ad; or to prevent fraud. Gathering this operational data may involve the use of cookies separate from those used to enable interest-based ad targeting, or to maintain a consumer’s opt out preference.

Chuck Curran, then-Network Advertising Initiative chief, in Moving the Goal Posts Without Changing the Rule Book, 14 July 2011

6. But opting out from being tracked is exactly what web-users want (and think they’re getting.

7. The bigger questions: should the ability to opt-out of tracking be a right? And why?

Companies’ ability to track people online has significantly outpaced the cultural norms and expectations of privacy. This is not because online companies are worse than their offline counterparts, but rather because what they can do is so, so different. We don’t have a language for talking about how these companies function or how our society should deal with them.

The word you hear over and over and over is that targeted ads can be “creepy.” It even crops up in the academic literature, despite its vague meaning in this context. My intuition is that we use the word “creepy” precisely because it is an indeterminate word. It connotes that tingling-back-of-the-neck feeling, but not necessarily more than that. The creepy feeling is a sign to pay attention to a possibly harmful phenomenon. But we can’t sort our feelings into categories — dangerous or harmless — because we don’t actually know what’s going to happen with all the data that’s being collected.

8. Two slightly unclear points:

• Online searches are tracked by cookies, which serve as identity-markers but aren’t connected to your actual identity through your name or other real-world markers of identity (passport, social security number). That’s a good thing. However this can & will change.
• A machine watching what you do is more “private” than a human being watching it. So at the moment that’s ok - but as machine learning develops, that privacy will be lost.

9. Conclusions - it’s difficult:

• Tech solutions will be developed, but only small elites will use them. Most internet users will continue to give away vast amounts of information.
• However targeted advertising is how websites make money - and it’s hard enough [for magazines & news media] to do that online as it is.
• Advertising-supported free media is better than paywalled closed media.

10. Optimistic coda:

Perhaps there are natural limits to what data targeting can do for advertisers and when we look back in 10 years at why data collection practices changed, it will not be because of regulation or self-regulation or a user uprising. No, it will be because the best ads could not be targeted. It will be because the whole idea did not work

*

C O M M E N T

A lot of interesting and important points raised. Very useful to see how the online advertising ecosystem is actually structured - a hell of a lot of companies - and it’s good to see reasons for tracking explained too. What’s important to acknowledge is that these companies aren’t actively malicious or trying to build a dystopia of total surveillance - that’s really the unintended side effect of trying to work out how to sell you a pair of shoes you looked at in a store two days ago. The motivations are very prosaic and not in themselves evil - the “creepy” that Madrigal outlines so well is an emergent property of the system.

Second useful thing was learning that “do not track” options don’t actually deliver not-tracking. It will be incredibly difficult to do this effectively:

• The industry will resist any regulation.
• Market research is claiming an exemption from do not track settings and I would bet that much of the tracking Madrigal describes (from the orange ‘support’ services) might claim to be market research measurement.
• Companies will claim ignorance about the rules, and not follow them
• Companies will claim exemption by being based in parts of the world where these laws don’t reach.
• Clients (brands buying advertising) will not exercise any oversight - let alone due diligence - on the ad services they’re buying. There’ll be a lot of “don’t ask, don’t tell” to continue delivering illegal or illegit tracking.

Third useful thing: we’ve got to think about how websites can make money. Advertising is the business model enabling the free-at-the-point-of-use web. Subscription is not only a bad idea (a more closed web), it can’t work - I read far too many different news sites to be able to subscribe to them all. Voluntary micropayments? Possibly, though it’d be fascinating to see how those would be distributed - likely to very rapidly shake up what’s a viable web news site.

Fourth point to remember: maybe targeted advertising won’t deliver what brands (ad buyers) need. Definitely some mileage in this argument. Niche targeting can’t deliver that watercooler moment where everyone’s talking about a new ad because they’ve all seen it - and how well can it predict who best to serve ads designed to build brand awareness, not direct purchases? It also undersells strong creative, which can appeal to people beyond the targeted niche. Essentially I can see the prestigious campaigns with the biggest ad spends choosing not to buy targeted space (which is after all more expensive) - and also perhaps premium press choosing not to sell it. (However that still leaves ambulance-chasing lawyers on DailyStar.co.uk, so not a total panacea.)

Consumers are uninformed, and consequently paranoid, about data collection and privacy standards. They presume marketers are peering into their personal lives and equate web analysts to identity thieves. What they fail to understand are the hidden costs to cracking down on privacy, for the capitalist and consumer in us all. Privacy restrictions will result in decreased sales, lost jobs, poor content, irrelevant advertising and shitty consumer experiences. It will set digital technology back a decade. One could argue this pro-privacy is almost rooted in anti-capitalism.

As marketers and advertisers, we only stand to lose. Advancements in neuromarketing and analytics are making great strides to give those very same consumers truly personalized digital experience across all mediums. We envision experiences that put their needs before those of brands and actually improve lives.

If there was ever a time to fight ignorance, it’s now. Join us for a heated debate over this brewing topic

What a vile SXSWi panel….

The “OMG reds under the bed!!!!” comment can stand for itself. Neuromarketing has also never (AFAIK) produced any results of any robustness or significance, but we’ll also let that stand for the moment.

My particular objection is that this panel destroys itself by its own logic:

• 1. It’s logically inconsistent
  he appeal to allow marketers to track everything is putatively to get “experiences” that “put [consumers’] needs above those of brands”. But the complaint is exactly that consumers are putting their feelings of concern above thinking of the poor ickle advertisers & sacrificing their privacy For The Sake Of Capitalism.
• 2. It’s bad marketing
  Proposing the consumer as “ignorant” and proposing to “fight” them, what bellicose nonsense! Assuming that your customers are idiots who need to be “educated” (-slash-brainwashed) gets you nowhere, as you’re refusing to understand why they’re resisting. If you don’t understand your customer’s needs, you’ve little likelihood of being able to sell them something they want.

1. A Guide to the Digital Advertising Industry That’s Watching Your Every Click
Joseph Turow, The Atlantic, 7 Feb 2012
An excerpt from his new book, The Daily You.

2. How Companies Learn Your Secrets
Charles Duhigg, New York Times, 16 Feb 2012
The Target / pregnant teenager case-study you’ve already read.

3. Predictive Analytics and Information Camouflage
Rob Horning, the New Inquiry, 17 Feb 2012.

Says Horning:

As with political scandal, what’s so bothersome about this less the targeting itself — though that is bad for reasons Turow details, more on that below — but the cover-up. Retailers don’t want transparency in their attempts to manipulate your behavior; they want to control how your habits evolve. They understand that the more you know about their techniques, the less effective they will be. And they try to justify themselves with the idea that they know better than us what we really want and their marketing techniques allow us to get out of our way to indulge ourselves how we really want and become who we really want to be.
Thus Duhigg concludes with this quote from Target’s targeting guru: “Just wait. We’ll be sending you coupons for things you want before you even know you want them.” We’re supposed to think that is a good thing. We’re not supposed to think that the company is using the data it has collected on us to shape the possibilities of what we can become, to control the context in which we make our lives and understand ourselves.

This is the crux of the objection: now advertising might really be successful at controlling us.

It implies, perhaps, a belief that advertising is not yet doing so. This is a view not universally shared: for example, in Baudrillard’s conception of the consumer.

In The Consumer Society, Baudrillard writes of the consumer as not fully formed, without predetermined desires guiding their consumption choices (as per the classic economic model) – need is instead “the product of the system of production” (1998:74). [Whether companies/brands can be said to have more agency in generating needs than consumers, however, is as far as I recall unclear. Need is generated by the system, not by specific producers per se.]

The consumer cannot even choose to choose: consumption is institutionally enforced behaviour. There is an ideology of freedom, but this simply serves to conceal how consumption acts as social control in the industrial system (1998: 80-1,84).

Although “there is no-one there – no person” (1998: 88), self-actualisation is nonetheless possible, even the goal of the consumer: in the absence of the self as an absolute whole, we must re-form ourselves within the system of differences, creating anonymous ‘synthetic individuality’. The consumer seeks out personalised goods in search of that “difference which will make us ourselves.” (1998: 87) The sign-value of each object bought will refer to a whole set of related signs, so consumers effectively buy into ready made lifestyles in the search for identity (Don Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity 1997: 191). In some ways this is not really self-actualisation, as the consumer has no agency to make significant decisions – they are wholly controlled by the code which they do not create. No resistance is possible.

Baudrillard would, no doubt, be amused by these developments in digital advertising - he is a theorist who does not offer much hope, just a wry shrug and an “I told you so.” From reading Baudrillard, we are offered no solution.

Is one needed? How radical and how alarming, actually, are these developments in digital advertising?

From Duhigg’s article we learn that Target can potentially know a hell of a lot about us. However, it leverages this by… sending people discount coupons.

What’s more, because of the data attached to her Guest ID number, Target knows how to trigger Jenny’s habits. They know that if she receives a coupon via e-mail, it will most likely cue her to buy online. They know that if she receives an ad in the mail on Friday, she frequently uses it on a weekend trip to the store. And they know that if they reward her with a printed receipt that entitles her to a free cup of Starbucks coffee, she’ll use it when she comes back again.

This is a little underwhelming - first, what percentage of discount coupons get used? Given the relatively high friction of bringing them with you / actually completing a purchase online, I imagine the answer’s not high - perhaps 10%. This skews people’s shopping baskets slightly, but it’s not total control.

What would be more concerning was if the recommendations start to make the purchase for you - e.g. they pre-fill your grocery basket when you come to online shop, so you have to actively remove them. Tesco actually offer a ‘predictive shop’ option as a perk to encourage you to start shopping online - “Enter your Clubcard number when you register to see what you regularly buy in store” as a “fantastic reason to shop with us”. Building in Clubcard promotions to this wouldn’t be hard. There is however the risk that any consumer backlash - any dis-ease - immediately and visibily hits the bottom line, in the form of more ‘abandoned carts’ as people see the prediction, freak out, and log off. Given this, there may be some wariness to introduce.

Another chance for liberty (after a sort) is suggested by Horning’s comment: “They understand that the more you know about their techniques, the less effective they will be.” According to a discussion on Quora, 2% of Firefox viewers - but perhaps 14% of active website visits - are made by people with Ad Blocker installed in their browser - making targeted online advertising a moot point.

From Quora [anonymouse]:

There’s been a lot of disparaging remarks regarding ad blocking software here on Quora. In your own echo chambers, you can tell each other that ad blocking software is insignificant, wrong, anti-social, non-viral, immoral, geeky and no one really uses it because it threatens your business. Keep thinking that way. Like the local defunct hardware stores, your day will come and you’ll never understand why

Coupons, online advertising… Digital marketing may be gaining a lot more knowledge about the consumer, but I’m skeptical as to whether this is actually a step-change in how effective it is in driving action.

This may be because there’s still space left for free choice and action… Or it may because systemically (a la Baudrillard) we have no means left of relating to the world except through the consumption of signs. Depending on the weather, my view changes.

chartier:

• Not offer a way to download our data in some sort of a standard, transparent, and at least somewhat human-siftable format
• Hide or otherwise be opaque about precisely what personal data you smuggle out of our devices
• Not offer a one-to-two-click process for deleting our accounts
• Fail to actually remove our data from your serversafter we delete our accounts (while complying with applicable regional laws governing data retention)
• Believe that taking VC and selling your customers’s private information is the only way to get a company off the ground, let alone run a successful business
• Not use SSL for passing even the slightest bit of private information
• Offer Facebook Connect as your only signup option

All this, and it’s also not ok to:

• Have a real-names-only policy (riddle me “real”, fratboy!)
• Not write your privacy policy in plain English
• Not understand the coming EU data protection laws and have a plan for compliance with them (rather than just hoping that there’ll be too many companies in breach for you to get in trouble)

“Within the next few years an important threshold will be crossed: For the first time ever, it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders—every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner.

Plummeting digital storage costs will soon make it possible for authoritarian regimes to not only monitor known dissidents, but to also store the complete set of digital data associated with everyone within their borders. These enormous databases of captured information will create what amounts to a surveillance time machine, enabling state security services to retroactively eavesdrop on people in the months and years before they were designated as surveillance targets. This will fundamentally change the dynamics of dissent, insurgency and revolution.

Laurent Stalder, an architecture professor at ETH Zurich, has recently been studying two topics: the emergence of the English House as it entered German culture in the 1890s, and the nature of the threshold. Privacy is associated with enclosed spaces, he tells us. The desire for intimacy and protection, enclosed on all sides, reached its apogee with the Victorian house.

Since then, we’ve seen a reconsideration of the wall as a limit between interior and exterior space. We can think of the “unprivate house”, like Philip Jonson’s glass house in New Canaan CT, a house which has the state of being permanently accessible. On the one hand, we have open houses – a thresholdless space, a seamless environment – and on the other hand, spaces that are inherently about control: airports, laboratories.

The traditional door was a clear boundary between public space and complete privacy. The emergence of different threshold devices has fractured that space. These devices are anthropomorphic – they shape our activities by prescribing certain behaviors. And we see rituals associated with thresholds: cleansing, absolution. We need to think through the difference between a border and a threshold – a border can be closed, while threshold is a neutral space, and a contested one.

God I need to work on this.

Glenn Greenwald, The always-expanding bipartisan Surveillance State, in Salon 20th May 2011

Doubtless you’ve already read the context in the Top Secret America project from the Washington Post.

1.Vernacular resistance to data collection and analysis: a political theory of obfuscation
by Finn Brunton & Helen Nissenbaum
in First Monday 16(5), May 2011

Computer–enabled data collection, aggregation, and mining dramatically change the nature of contemporary surveillance. Refusal is not a practical option, as data collection is an inherent condition of many essential societal transactions. We present one vernacular response to this regime of everyday surveillance, a tactic we call obfuscation. With a variety of possible motivations, actors engage in obfuscation by producing misleading, false, or ambiguous data with the intention of confusing an adversary or simply adding to the time or cost of separating bad data from good. Our paper develops a political philosophy of obfuscation, linking contemporary and historical cases to develop a descriptive account of obfuscation that is able to capture key commonalities in systems from radar chaff to BitTorrent.

They make a number of important arguments and deep, rigorous thinking - very highly recommended reading if you want to understand what big data means for ordinary people on empirical, theoretical and political levels.

2. A new paper from the McKinsey Global Institute research group on Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity

They’ve come up with some pretty wild figures as to the financial savings ‘big data’ could enable - $300bn in healthcare; $100bn in government; location data alone allowing the private sector to access $600bn in consumer surplus — though surely that’s $600bn we consumers wouldn’t be able to spend on other things, thereby minimising its net economic impact. If McKinsey are arguing that location-based services are a licence to print money, then they’re about a year behind the rest of the (highly Groupon-skeptical) internet…

But nonetheless, a nice list of five ways organisations can use big data to improve how they operate:

• Making big data more accessible in a timely manner. In the public sector, making data more accessible across otherwise separated departments can sharply reduce search and processing time. In manufacturing, integrating data from R&D, engineering, and manufacturing units to enable concurrent engineering can cut time-to-market.
• Using data and experimentation to expose variability and improve performance. As they create and store more transactional data in digital form, organizations can collect more accurate and detailed performance data on everything from product inventories to personnel sick days.
• Segmenting populations to customize actions. Big data allow organizations to create ever-narrower segmentations and to tailor services precisely to meet customer needs. This approach is well-known in marketing and risk management, but can be revolutionary in places like the public sector.
• Replacing and supporting human decision-making with automated algorithms. Sophisticated analytics can substantially improve decision making, minimize risks, and unearth valuable insights that would otherwise remain hidden. Such analytics have applications from tax agencies to retailers.
• Innovating new business models, products, and services. Manufacturers are using data obtained from the use of products to improve the development of the next generation of products, and to create innovative after-sales service offerings. The emergence of real-time location data has created a new set of location-based mobile services from navigation to people tracking.

The New York Times article on this report, New Ways to Exploit Raw Data May Bring Surge of Innovation, is essentially churnalism of McKinsey’s press release - it’s not notably critical or even thoughtful, but does manage a catchy soundbite:

Data is a vital raw material of the information economy, much as coal and iron ore were in the Industrial Revolution.

3. Big list of papers on digital surveillance to download, via the excellent @SubMedina

Particularly like Social Media and the Rise of Surveillance-based Advertising [PDF] by Elijah Sparrow:

Commercial surveillance is deeply entrenched in the technical and economic practice of social media companies. Both targeted advertising and social media share a common, and effective, response to the contradictions of information capitalism: encourage users to generate data, mine this data for trends, and sell it back to them as empowerment

I keep a really close eye on my privacy settings, but Facebook still change them without warning and leave me unawares that I’m sharing things with applications I don’t even use.

Check out your settings for the following:

Privacy settings > Apps, games & websites > Information accessible through your friends

“Use the settings below to control which of your information is available to applications, games and websites when your friends use them.”

Turned out everything I share as ‘friends only’ was available to ANY app my friends might be using… One n00b uses Farmville and Farmville get all my info to play with - even though I don’t use apps because I don’t want my information shared like this, and my own app settings are much tighter.

Also watch out for “instant personalisation” sharing your data with other websites. It’s not enabled yet but is fixed as opt-in, and I can’t untick it until they enable it.

Another scummy low-down automatic opt-in from Facebook… Classy work guys. How much longer can misleading and pissing off your users really be a sustainable way to build a business? More valuable than Tesco my ass…

Got a letter from the government the other day
I opened it and read it - it said we voters are suckers
They wanted me for their database or whatever?
Picture me givin’ a damn - you’d better.
Here is a man who promised that he’d can
The surveillance state - and another
Who said he’d keep yr data hid
I wasn’t with it but just this very minute
It occurs to me
Those suckers have authority

*

Aka a really quite spectacular U-turn from both parties in the coalition government, who, despite making nice noises about digital freedom in the run-up to the election, have now decided to spend £2bn we can’t spare on storing every email, webpage accessed and phonecall in the UK.

Send your own letter to the government here, through the Open Rights Group.

“We will make the Internet real name system a reality as soon as possible, implement a nationwide cell phone real name system, and gradually apply the real name registration system to online interactive processes.” — Wang Chen, director, Chinese State Council Information Office.

“To get people to this point where there’s more openness — that’s a big challenge. But I think we’ll do it. I just think it will take time…. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” — Mark Zuckerberg.

But hang on dear boy, are those positions really similar? Wang Chen speaks for the largest authoritarian government in the world; Zuckerberg’s a Harvard white boy who can’t comprehend that not everyone’s got the privileges he has to say what they want.

I don’t think the similarities are superficial. Wang and Zuckerberg each represent a form of power that’s threatened by the ability to have multiple online identities - or none. In Wang’s case, that form of power is national government; in Zuckerberg’s, it’s demographic marketing. Each of those forms constructs individuals with certain inseparable characteristics - one age, one race, one name, one sex, one body, one address - as the atoms of its power, and each calls out to those individuals to recognise themselves as such. You’re Chinese - why are you criticising your own country? You’re a thirtysomething white male urban technical professional - how the hell could you not own an Android phone? It was made for you!

Zuckerberg’s not naive. His whole business is built on linking what people read, write and look at online to demographic information about them, and he’s just as threatened as the CCP by the idea that the people you meet online might not need to be people at all.

Spitalfields is now such a non-public corporate plaza that there’s even surveillance on the frogs in the pond…

1. Companies are mining the social web to build dossiers on you. Anything you post to blogs, Facebook, Twitter or other websites will be stored in a cross-referenced database of your online activities, to be sold to marketers - and, frankly, whoever the hell wants it, for whatever the hell purpose - to track you down as an individual.

Jules Polonetsky, director and co-chair of the Future of Privacy Forum, said online users have no clue that a comment they made on a blog is being added to a database for some unknown use.

“I don’t think users expect that,” he said, and if consumers think idle chatter and casual conversation can be used against them by institutions, it’s almost certain to create a backlash, according to Polonetsky. He said the Federal Trade Commission is right now re-examining the current privacy structure in the U.S.

But at the same time, he said consumers are always very comfortable with Amazon using data to recommend books they might like. “When users are in control of it, it’s a win-win — if they feel empowered.”

Do marketers realise that what they’re doing is sinister? The article linked above (on Mashable) discusses how credit card companies are looking at people’s social connections to sell them new products. So-so. But what about a US health insurer using this information to deny coverage to people who they can classify as ‘high risk’ because they live in areas or communities with poor health? Or anti-abortion terrorists using this information to harass women who’ve been asking questions about abortion? “I know who you are and I know where you live” - the dark side of personalisation is a flat-out threat.

What marketers behind this - e.g. Rapleaf.com with some 389 million people tracked - don’t want to acknowledge is consent. I’ve given Amazon lots of information about the books I’ve bought and the books I like, so not only have I opted into its recommendations process but it’s also quite transparent. The exact algorithm might remain a mystery, but I know the data-points it’s feeding into that sum, and I know what it’s going to try & do with that data, viz, recommend me books in the hope I might buy them.

But no-one’s opted-in to having their online social lives (Twitter, FB, blogs & the rest) mined for information like this. While web users are aware that what they say in these forums is public, I’d argue that we’re used to thinking about a human-scale definition of public which is now dangerously obsolete.

This human-scale public is what we’re used to walking down a city street. Sure, anyone might see us, but there are two crucial points: (i) whoever can see me, I can also see them, and (ii) in a crowd of strangers I am both in public and anonymous. I would argue that this is the kind of “public-ness” people instinctively imagine they have online.

E.g. if I make some comments on a message board of course I know that anyone else on that site (=city street) will be able to read it, but it’s unlikely anyone I know from elsewhere will come wandering by and see what I’ve been up to. Perhaps I’ve posted under a handle or pseudonym, so surely that’s anonymous vis-a-vis my real name. This, I argue, is how most people instinctively think about public comments they make on the internet: an effective anonymity by dint of scale.

But these aggregating and connecting web trackers aren’t human-scale. This is a new techno-scale public in which everything publicly visible will be seen (collected, aggregated, linked) rather than simply can. The balance of possibility has shifted, such that actually the online public isn’t anonymous any more - the internet’s still too big for a human acquaintance to happen across everything you’ve said elsewhere, but it’s easy for a crawler to grab it all.

As mentioned below, you don’t need to leave a comment with your name on it for a website to trace your identity. That question you had about redundancy? Assume your bank can find out. Sexual health? Your health insurer wants to know. This is the surveillance public, the online equivalent of urban CCTV with face recognition and car numberplate tracking. You’re still free to do anything… As long as you’re happy for anyone to know about it.

2. Introducing ubercookies, a technique for websites to uncover the exact identities of visitors by using Flash to probe their browser histories for identifiable patterns. This is made even easier by the social web.

3. What can I find out about you if I know your email address? Answer: a lot, including full name and location allowing for telephone number look-ups.

4. My hacker boyfriend close friend the security researcher recommends Mozilla add-on BetterPrivacy for blocking Flash cookies, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation / Tor add-on HTTPS everywhere which encrypts your communications with major websites.