Protecting Digital You Part 1: You're Being Followed And Profiled

This is going to be a multi-part series looking into how, at a high level, our data is exploited. I'm hoping that through reading this you'll be encouraged to take a more active role in how you are tracked and that you'll understand the economic reasons for tracking you.

The Matrix And Real Reality

If you've ever seen the Matrix, the premise is really interesting and the directors have even come out to say that it is an allegory for being trans^[1]. I like to also interpret the movie as a film of being exploited and developing class consciousness^[2]. Class consciousness happens when Neo wakes up from the matrix and is aware of what the machines are doing to people. I found the parallels between what the machines are doing to humans in the movie, very similar to what corporations are doing to us in real life.

If you haven't seen the movie, I highly recommend it.

I started this blog to share my thoughts on capitalism, and one choice I had to make was if I would pay for a service and where it would be hosted. It felt weird talking about and criticizing capitalism while also utilizing tools of some of the most capitalistic companies like Google and so on. These tools are extremely easy to use because billions have been spent creating and maintaining them. They are also free which typically means you or your data are the product.

What I didn't know at the time was that there were also many open source^[3] alternatives available! A lot of the internet is run on open source software. Some examples of tools that are open sourced: Github (git), Ubuntu (linux) and router software (your wifi router) (OpenWRT). These are tools that are incredibly useful for people who build and use the internet (including non-technical people) and they're completely free!

Ghost is one of those tools and it is what powers this website. Ghost is an open source blogging platform that is integrated with many other tools that allow me to send bulk emails, create posts, manage members and collect subscription payments. So the question you might be asking is, Pablo, what are the benefits of using open source software to host your own service? It has a lot to do with how companies utilize our data in exploitative ways.

How You Are Being Followed

On the internet, your data is typically composed of two things: metadata and content or payload. For example text messages might have metadata like, sender, receiver, location, time send, time received, time read, length of message, if it contained attachments or not etc etc. The content or payload would be the message itself. When people talk about end to end encryption, they are typically talking about the payload, but not the metadata.

At minimum here is the basic metadata a company likely captures:

Beyond that, here is a table of additional data a company would want, and this is bare minimum that I can think of. Companies pour billions into data mining, so there is probably hundreds more pieces of data they are collecting:

Based on this table, you see some of the data that someone can gather about you, simply by interacting with a service or a person. Some metadata like the recipient phone number is necessary because you need your message to arrive at its final destination. But other things maybe aren't necessary for a service, but they do say a lot about you as a person. There is a great short story^[5] I highly recommend you read about how meta data alone can be used to determine associated groups of people, without even needing to know what they're saying to each other.

One thing I'll cover in another part of this series is who has access to your data along the way to delivering some kind of content or payload (spoiler alert, it's actually a lot of people).

All of these data points are utilized by companies to paint a picture of who you might be and what you might be interested in. And not just you but other people who might be like you. They might say: person A is currently interested in cameras, let's try to find another person like person A and sell them cameras too. And person A could be someone who just bought a plane ticket.

Why Your Data Is Extremely Valuable To Advertisers and Tech Companies

Companies make money by knowing what to sell you when. If they can catch you at the right moment then they can sell you something and you will be most likely to buy it, even if you don't need it. I am guilty of looking at Instagram ads and debating buying something, even though I didn't have the intention of buying anything when I opened the app. I open the app to just see what friends and others are up to, and I'm tricked into being a consumer.

Beyond trying to get you to buy things, as I mentioned above, they also want to get people who are like you, who they may not have much data on, to buy things as well. If they can get some signals from some people they can take a guess that they are similar to other users with more data, and that allows them to sell to them more accurately.

So your data is really useful for profiling you and others. It helps companies be able to know who you are, where you are and what you are up to and what your intent to purchase something might be. They take your data, profile you and then sell you to advertisers and say: here's a user we think is interested in buying your product, if you pay us, we'll show them your ad. This is the basis of most internet advertising businesses.

Why Your Data Is Extremely Valuable To Governments

More insidious than trying to get you to buy things, profiling you as a threat is also very useful to government agencies. The U.S. government is interested in suppressing terrorism and protests, so they can use the same technology to bucket people into people they may need to keep an eye on.

Governments like the U.S. and Israel (amongst all western powers essentially) are the biggest users of metadata. They work with telephone companies, tech companies and social media companies to know who you are, who you're talking to, what you might be interested in. I'll try to link some references, but this is a widely known truth at this point.

Why would the government be interested in you if you have nothing to hide? Maybe today there is no reason for you to be angry about what the government does, but one day you will be really angry at what they are doing, and you will be interested in organizing and protesting. Then it will be really important what type of information governments and tech companies extract from you.

Part 1: Final Thoughts

I hope that understanding how you are being harvested is really helpful. It should be a bit scary how much we are being harvested for our data and being pushed to consume more and more. Hope this gives you insight into every click, like, share, etc and how you might start to see how your trail on the internet can be used against you, to get you to buy things, profile you and suppress ideas that they think are harmful.

Next: Protecting Digital You Part 2: Secure Your Data/Identity:

In the next post I'll cover all the different ways you can protect your identity. I'll give examples . This isn't a perfect thing to do, however you can do some simple things that help protect who you are and what you do to a certain extent.

[1]. ['I, too, was living a double life': Why trans fans connect to 'The Matrix'] [URL] (https://www.npr.org/2021/12/22/1066554369/the-matrix-original-trans-fans-resurrections)

[2]. [Class consciousness] [URL] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_consciousness)

[3]. Open Source is software that is written and maintained by various engineers who want to just give people tools that they find useful. It means that anyone can run the software. There are many websites that highlight alternatives. Here is one: https://www.opensourcealternative.to/ I don't endorse it or anything.

[4]. In end-to-end (e2e) encrypted messaging, the payload will not be visible to the service provider IF they do not have the keys do decrypt.

[5]. [Using Metadata to find Paul Revere] [URL] (https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/)