Trackology over the internet a matter of everyone

Trackology is the science of tracking people information over the internet.

The information tracked can be (gender, political opinion, sexual orientation, habits, interests, general opinion about an individual, religion)

Once the information is tracked, they will be collected, analyzed, processed, aggregated and sold to a third party or used for other interests.

Most of the websites use the cookies to track data from the websites but we can also use other technologies such as account tracking, fingerprint, web beacons to achieve this goal.

Many companies do track the data over the internet for marketing reason or advertisement, but others such as media and government might tracked for other reasons like political reasons. Many Medias nowadays collect data over different social medias that will be analyzed later. One example that we can give is the actual situation between Ukraine and Russia. The medias by using their pages over different social medias, can post something related to the topic and people will comment, based on the comments from different platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, we can determine what people think about the Russia invasion.

 

How to test people to determine their opinion.

Let’s use a technic calls profiling which consists of collection information such as gender, political opinion, sexual orientation, habits, interests, general opinion about an individual, religion about a person or group of persons that will be used later to make a decision about the person or the group of persons.

As an example, we want to know what people think about LGBT in the world. We will create a group on Facebook and posts different messages and analyze it.

Let’s create a group on Facebook and call it “We love LGBT”. Post something on the page and wait for the comments and people reaction.

Once you analyzed the data collected, you can guess people opinion about such topic in general.

This technic is used by many entities such as medias, E-commerce, Sports to sell their products or to make a decision.

Risks related to data tracking

If the data are not tracked following the regulations, many issues may be arised.

With the example we gave above about “LGBT”, imagine that you apply for a job, and you should have an interview with the company. Before the interview the company tracked you from different social media and reveal your negative comment about “LGBT”, if the manager is a gay or Lesbian or one the people who received the feedback after the data collection, then it could impact negatively the interview. In order to avoid such issue, the regulations should protect people privacy over the internet.

 

As we see, the data tracked could lead to prejudice, as the simple comment made cost the person to lose the job.

 Advantages of data tracking

Like we said before, many businesses do track data for marketing or advertisement reasons, which help those businesses to improve the way to sell their products. 

Data tracking can also help to find terrorist. As today the world is facing with many terrorists attack so the data tracking could be very important for entities such as police departments, militaries, Threat investigation and so on.

Data tracking could be used also for background checking to determine if the person is suitable for the position. 

As you see, everything can have a good side and bad side. The best way to be on the good side will be to follow the regulations and best practices and monitor them as well.

Solution against data tracking without the consent of people

They are many solutions to avoid being tracked by the websites you visit.                 

• Enable cookies (check the cookies preference before accepting it)
• Enable DO NOT TRACK
• Do not give a permission to share your data to a third party (Social medias like Facebook, Google, Twitter do it, you need to edit the setting option to not allow it)
• Implement a data privacy regulation if not in place (this should be done by each country) and if the companies comply with it.
• You can use a tool like Trackography – Who tracks you online?   To verify where your data are going when you connect to some medias.
• Use VPN or a browser like TOR, TRAILS to stay anonymous online.
• Use proxy to hide your activities over the internet.
• Use incognito mode (it does not provide complete privacy)

They are many other solutions to stay protected online. But the best way to be protected is to not stay online which is not possible. Therefore, follow the best practices always is the key to stay safe online.