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Re: Browser/privacy woes
jakob wrote #314723:
Hi Peter, I may have to backtrack on that recommendation. Having just watched Aral Balkan’s talk on Blendwebmix, (first keynote lecture on 24/10 – you have to scroll to the top of the list on that day and click – thanks for the pointer Destry), he highlighted some questionable practices by them that I wasn’t aware of – ditto Mozilla, ditto AdBlockPlus, ditto Ghostery…
Jacob,
As I’m not known to be patient with videos, could you summarize what those questionable practices are ? (Ghostery and AdBlockPlus I can guess…, there is a reason why I dumbed Ghostery), Mozilla and Brave, I’m not sure.
PS – the guy sells his own Content blocker extension for Safari: Better Blocker.
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Re: Browser/privacy woes
Sorry, I wanted to post a link to that section but it is a live stream of the whole day and the player doesn’t show the minutes so it was hard to even find it again. And today, the live stream from yesterday is no longer on that page – maybe they’ll put it back online afterwards. Aside from that it was a small sliver of a wider topic. He gave a compelling talk (on a bizarre “Magic Roundabout”-like stage) but of course has a specific agenda so he was liberally debunking left, right and centre as well as exposing the hypocrisies of many working in the field (e.g. high-profile privacy conferences sponsored by Google, Facebook and Microsoft). I’m sure that depending on who you ask, you may hear that he’s over-dramatising things or he’s not dramatising things enough. I’ve not fact-checked any of this, so apologies for simply regurgitating on.
Anyhow, aside from the general criticism that Brave is venture capital funded (i.e. private investment = influence taking), his main criticism of Brave is that the browser is the first step of (he calls it “a Trojan Horse for”) another (blockchain-based) advertising metric system called Basic Attention Token described here quite openly: https://basicattentiontoken.org. So he questions their true motives.
His beef with ABP is that it allows preferred advertising through to those who pay (I wasn’t aware of that) and with Ghostery that they don’t just block tracked but also track what they block and then sell that data (I didn’t know that either). His beef with Mozilla is that they’re again funded to a large part by Google: https://twitter.com/aral/status/978921984737316865 and thus not truly independent of what he calls “surveillance capitalism”. Decide for yourselves.
As you point out, he has a content blocker that he sells, but he seems (to me) far too ‘angry’ and principled for that to be his motive. The talk was not about content blocking but about people versus profiles and the path required (he describes it “the ocean we will need to cross”) to raise awareness and make it easy for people to opt in or out on their own terms. He touched on, for example, the frequent but unhelpful arrogance of IT experts that declare those not willing to switch (because they’re unwilling or unable or for whatever reason incapable of investing the time and specialist effort to set up their own systems) as effectively being minions of the system. So if anything, their content blocker is an attempt to “pave” part of that way and is thus not free in terms of money (but free in terms of outside influence) and also available on the regular app stores. Anyhow, they spell out their aims and ethics on https://ind.ie. Again, decide for yourselves.
I’m sure there are for and against arguments for the behaviour of all the above-mentioned firms … survival, (legitimate forms of) monetisation through advertising, personal privacy… and those arguments will shift depending on the “who for” or “who against”…
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Re: Browser/privacy woes
Thanks for the summary, Jacob.
He basically confirms what I knew about ABP and suspected about Ghostery. And yeah, project funding is a huge problem (I bought my Content blocker on duty1). He is a bit harsh on Mozilla, though.
Note Mozilla today has released Firefox 63, which includes the tracking blocker I mentioned above. It is not (yet?) turned on by default, so visit the Preferences (Privacy, cookies)
1 ~ 1000 Yen, about 8 USD if memory serves. That is equivalent of rice of a whole week for my family, to put things in perspective.
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#28 2018-10-25 15:11:03
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Re: Browser/privacy woes
Very similar to Brave’s business model is Cliqz, a Munich based browser/company who created their own microcosm of browser services (e.g. presenting proposals/ads on an internal tab, securing/collecting site visits with their own safeguard methods) and their own system of collecting and delivering data (again meters and meters of screen heights for their babble pages on privacy and terms).
I blocked most of their IPs right off so I can’t tell much more about what would have happened in my browser, but I was surprised about how many domains and subdomains my firewall had to filter out in the course of two weeks in order to get just the desired web contents.
Meanwhile deleted, BTW
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Re: Browser/privacy woes
jakob wrote #314723:
Balkan’s talk on Blendwebmix . . .
I watched that. Quite good.
jakob wrote #314729:
I’m sure that depending on who you ask, you may hear that he’s over-dramatising things or he’s not dramatising things enough. I’ve not fact-checked any of this, so apologies for simply regurgitating on.
I think he does irritate the digerati and big tech lovers, for sure, but that’s intentional, to get visibility so his message gets wider attention. And no doubt he has a biz agenda in addition to an ethical one. (He’s also a big human rights advocate/activist. His roots are Turkish and he’s outspokenly anti-Erdogan and such.) But he’s been doing this a while and does his homework, from what I can tell. He makes quite the rounds too, he’s on prime time news a lot… I don’t think he’s pulling punches on his facts, considering how public and loud he is about it all.
what he calls “surveillance capitalism”.
He likes to use that term a lot, which is certainly a useful sharp stick. But he mentioned the source of the term in that talk, it’s not his. I can’t remember what he said though.
As you point out, he has a content blocker that he sells, but he seems (to me) far too ‘angry’ and principled for that to be his motive.
Agree. He genuinely seems to be a watchdog on big tech exploitation, and, sure, trying to push his ethical tools too. No harm there. Though, watch everybody, even the watchers. ;)
When he was talking about the problem with global personal data access/management as it is now (i.e. big tech/government rule) and how it should move to a more local model (i.e. ‘city’, he mentions Spain, though not entirely favourably) and decentralized, of course, I was thinking of the news about Google hooking it’s claws into Toronto. That’s not what Aral had in mind.
Even worse, Dubai. From that same article:
Take Dubai, says Ann Cavoukian, a civic-privacy specialist who is consulting for Sidewalk on the Toronto project. “It’s horrible—the antithesis of privacy. They use sensors to identify everybody and track their movements.” That city in the United Arab Emirates set out in 2014 to become what it called the world’s smartest city. The director of the effort has said, “In Dubai, we believe that happiness can be measured, and that we can aid our leadership to positively impact happiness for the city, through science and technology.”
When you research and read about how that city was built, and about what happens to people there under the gloss and glam, it’s scary. And now days their secret police know every social media post you make from there, and if they don’t like what they see, you’re in deep doodoo. I will never go to Dubai. Just knowing that cameras are on you every step and piss you take is not a pleasant thought.
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Re: Browser/privacy woes
I ue duckduckgo for my searches, haven’t used Google for some time now.
For the rest, I sleep at night knowing someone out there is watching my posts, texts, etc. I’m a boring person so they must fall asleep often as they track me. :-)
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