PUBLIC MARKS with tags privacy & tracking

WebCookies.info provides free audit of web cookies used by a website. See how websites are tracking user activities using web cookies, obtain an easy to understand cookie usage summary and find out about compliance with new EU privacy law. No additional software installation is required.

Floodwatch is a Chrome extension that tracks the ads you see as you browse the internet.

The entire ad placement network is one of the most complex computational systems on the planet. Behind The Banner is an attempt to understand the underlying interactions that define this ecosystem, and how they impact our daily use of the web.

We spend hours a day online, and we see ads on every webpage we visit. But we don’t have any way of tracking the ads we’re being served — we don’t even know how many ads the average person sees in a given day.

Over the last year, through the revelations of Ed Snowden and independent reporting by others, we've learned more and more about the National Security Agency's spying programs. Indeed, there have now been so many revelations that it can be hard to keep them straight. So here's a handy guide to the most significant ways the NSA spies on people in the United States and around the world.

My book, Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance is now available on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and IndieBound. Here’s the description and some review

Because of governance issues (and the international implications of the NSA reveals), data sharing will get geographically fragmented in challenging ways. The next few years are going to be about control. — DANAH BOYD

A new programming technique could bring these scenarios to life. Computer scientist Karl-Johan Karlsson has reprogrammed a phone to lie. By modifying the operating system of an Android-based smartphone, he was able to put decoy data on it—innocent numbers, for example—so that the real data escape forensics. He presented the hack in January at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

The White House may be asking food marketers to be responsible when it comes to marketing to kids, but the snack food industry still needs to keep increasing its profits. Mondelez International, the company that owns brands like Chips Ahoy and Ritz, is going about it in an intrusive and rather creepy way. This is something you need to be aware of.

We’re thrilled to announce that Skybox Imaging has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Google! Five years ago, we began the Skybox journey to revolutionize access to information about the changes happening across the surface of the Earth. We’ve made great strides in the pursuit of that vision. We’ve built and launched the world’s smallest high­-resolution imaging satellite, which collects beautiful and useful images and video every day. We have built an incredible team and empowered them to push the state­-of­-the-­art in imaging to new heights. The time is right to join a company who can challenge us to think even bigger and bolder, and who can support us in accelerating our ambitious vision.

Berkenstock describes his work at EmTech 2011: Cheaper satellite pictures. Skybox Imaging Dan Berkenstock, cofounder and chief product officer of Skybox Imaging, wants to let "anyone know what's happening anywhere in the world at any time." Next year the company plans to launch the first of what it hopes will be a constellation of 12 to 24 satellites taking high-­resolution pictures of Earth. Each satellite should cost about a tenth as much as the $250 million to $500 million imaging satellites operated by companies like DigitalGlobe and GeoEye.

Abstract We want to segment and track objects occluding each other in crowded scenes. We propose a tracking framework that mediates grouping cues from two levels of tracking granularities: coarse-grain detection tracklets and fine-grain point trajectories. Each tracking granularity proposes corresponding grouping cues: trajectories with similar long-term motion and disparity attract each other, detections overlapping in time repulse each other. Tracking is formulated as selection-clustering in the joint detection and trajectory space. Affinities of trajectories and detections will be contradictory in cases of false alarm detections or accidental motion similarity of trajectories. We resolve such contradictions in a steering-clustering framework where confident detections change trajectory affinities, by inducing repulsions between trajectories claimed by repulsive detection tracklets. Two-granularity tracking offers a unified representation for object segmentation and tracking independent of what objects to track, how occluded they are, whether monocular or binocular input or whether camera is moving or not.

Facebook announced changes to its privacy and advertising policies on its company blog last Thursday, extending Facebook's ability to track users outside of Facebook -- undoing previous assurances it "does not track users across the web."

The Web is our largest shared resource. Let's keep it free and open for us, and for the next generation.

Welcome to the consumer opt out page for the Self-Regulatory Program for Online Behavioral Advertising. Our participating companies are committed to transparency and choice. Some of the ads you receive on Web pages are customized based on predictions about your interests generated from your visits over time and across different Web sites. This type of ad customization — sometimes called "online behavioral" or "interest-based" advertising — is enabled through your computer browser and browser cookies. Such online advertising helps support the free content, products and services you get online.

The company previously allowed third-party firms such as Gnip, Datasift and Dataminr to buy access to the tweets and then re-sell that data to corporate clients.

Marketers are spying on Internet users -- observing and remembering people's clicks, and building and selling detailed dossiers of their activities and interests. The Wall Street Journal's What They Know series documents the new, cutting-edge uses of this Internet-tracking technology. The Journal analyzed the tracking files installed on people's computers by the 50 most popular U.S. websites, plus WSJ.com. The Journal also built an "exposure index" -- to determine the degree to which each site exposes visitors to monitoring -- by studying the tracking technologies they install and the privacy policies that guide their use.

If your growing weariness of being constantly tethered to the internet has become overwhelming, it might be time to scrub yourself from the social media sphere altogether. Here's how you can become a ghost on the Internet, by tracking down and eliminating your digital past.

As the internet continues to evolve, issues surrounding privacy remain a common cause for concern. There is growing anxiety among internet users of how their online activities are tracked for commercial purposes. The business model behind this is generally to aggregate a large number of users in order to sell that audience’s aggregate attention, usually in the form of advertising.  After all, “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”

Some of the biggest companies in tech are assembling new forms of online tracking that would follow users more aggressively than the open technologies used today. Just this week, word arrived that Microsoft is developing such a system, following, apparently, in the footsteps of Google.

The advertising industry suffered a setback late last night when the Tracking Protection Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium rejected the Digital Advertising Alliance's draft proposal for a universal Do Not Track standard.

Twitter Shows The Way Forward With Do Not Track Twitter today announced a new way of targeting advertisements for its users, including a partnership with three online tracking firms: media6degrees (m6d), Chango, and Adara. This new system will display ads based on your behavior and reading habits, which show up as "Promoted Tweets" or "Promoted Accounts." This is typical of the direction that major online companies are moving. But Twitter has made some praiseworthy design decisions:

In matters of Do Not Track, Twitter is doing things very, very right. The company unveiled yesterday its new ad retargeting effort, which lets it display advertisements to users based on their browsing activity. Basically, if you search for something like jeans online, you’re going to start a lot more advertisements for jeans in your Twitter feed. As Twitter argues, it’s all about seeing better, more relevant ads (and making more money from advertisers).