07/24/2024

This Machine Exposes Privacy Violations

A new search engine aims to find illicit online data collection and tracking

"It's not a level playing field," said Tim Libert, becoming animated as he shifts in his seat in his sparse home office in Sunnyvale, glancing between hulking monitors and clicking around on his desktop. "In fact it's the furthest [expletive] thing from a level playing field."

The thing that is agitating Libert is the same thing that has agitated him for over a decade, when, in 2012, as a grad student at the University of Pennsylvania, he began researching the ways the web tracks us. Every day, the companies that operate our most expansive and vital web infrastructure—Google, Microsoft, Facebook—track our browsing habits and gather extensive troves of data on us, based on what we search for and which pages we visit. And we, the ordinary internet users, have little idea which websites are collecting what data, and then sending it upstream to the likes of Google.

When you search for where to get an abortion, is sensitive data being tracked and collected? Unfortunately, very possibly so. Is an addiction treatment page or trans porn site exposing your IP address? Quite likely. Countless websites (truly countless—the scope, as we shall see, is nearly incomprehensible) are shipping private data about your web activity directly to the tech giants’ doorsteps. Thanks in part to the efforts of privacy researchers like Libert, we know this already, have known we’re being tracked for years—yet we lack knowledge of the specifics, and we lack agency, so this sea of privacy violations becomes another Bad Thing that happens on an internet teeming with them.

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.