Protecting your online privacy

Protecting Your Online Privacy Everybody Wants To Track You &Nobody Wants To Get Tracked!

Ram Parthasarathy@ramanujamramanuj.me

Saturday, November 9, 13

Privacy

Privacy is an individual’s right to control the collection, use and disclosure of

personal information

Saturday, November 9, 13

Who Tracks You Online?

• Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn

• Analytics Tools

• Ad serving companies

• Location based apps & services (run keeper, starbucks, yelp, groupon)

• ISPs, CDNs, Data brokers

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Why are you being tracked?

• Advertising is the backbone of many big internet services

• Providing you a better user experience

• Cheap and fast processing power and storage (Big Data!)

• Security & National Intelligence

• Spam, identity theft etc

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How is tracking done?

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Social Buttons

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HTTP Cookies & Flash Cookies

First Party Cookies

vs

Third Party Cookies

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Ever-cookies (aka Zombie Cookies)

Ad Tags & Pixels

iFrames

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How is this data used?

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Relevant Search Results - Good!

IP spoofed with a proxy

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Recommendations - Good!

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Info based on user action - Good!

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Excessive Ad Retargeting - Bad!

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Identity Theft, Selling data - Ugly!

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How Unique Are You ?

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How Unique Are You ?

33 Bits

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How Unique Are You ?

33 Bits

There are only 6.6 billion people in the world, so you only need 33 bits (more precisely, 32.6 bits) of information about a person to determine who they are.

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How Unique Are You ?

33 Bits

There are only 6.6 billion people in the world, so you only need 33 bits (more precisely, 32.6 bits) of information about a person to determine who they are.

- Arvind Narayanan, Princeton, http://33bits.org

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https://panopticlick.eff.org/Saturday, November 9, 13

How many trackers?

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What can YOU do?

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BUT...

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Really... What can YOU do?

Know and decide what you want to expose and what you don’t want to.

Choose the corresponding action.

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Some Common Methods

• The basic one - think for a second before you post something on the internet!

• Disable Javascript (Too aggressive!)

• Disable Third-Party cookies (Default on Safari. Firefox is trying to).

• Check Android App Permissions before you install.

• Use incognito mode.

• Use DuckDuckGo

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Browser Extensions

Ghosteryghostery.com

Disconnectdisconnect.me

ShareMeNotsharemenot.cs.washington.

edu/

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Thank You!Questions?

@ramanujam

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