Trackography

Current status, concept, next steps.

Executive Summary

Trackography is an observatory of the third party trackers in Internet websites; The goal is raise awareness on trackers presence and implication.

Has not to be confunded with other tool, like Lightbean, Disconnect.me, Ghostery or ADBlockPlus that monitor your personal navigation in order to display tracking. These tools are useful for the user itself, while Trackography want study the global phenomena.

How to reach the goals ?

  • Parnership
  • Display the global phenomena and technical explanation of what's going on
  • Because a trustworthy speaker on the tracking phenomena
  • Making pressure on who (we believe) is wrongdoing
  • Advocacy

Last Five months memorial

Since the CCC release to now

Unique asset

  • Foreign network infrastructure are used to reach Third party trackers ( cost: suppoting us is harder)
  • Company you never heard about are part of your navigation: we can display how much they are present, and correlate their behavior to a precise amount of person per nation (cost: we have to map these companies) Maria's collection, Editing Interface made easy.

Why the media ?

  • Media offer a public service
  • In some countries Media are state funded
  • The cut of population interacting with online media is the electing/working one, knowing their interest is sensitive for a foreign state
  • Current business model totally unbalanced, and the future experiment scarier: journalist know that, can be compelled.

Contextual Analysis

Made experiment to tackle smaller group:

Take the browser history of three community leaders and make that analysis
Choose a Twitter #hashtag and check all the link included where they bring and who's behind each one".

Benefit: much more concrete analysis, partnership and target

Some new (unpublished) interfaces

  • Details for every test
  • "Least concerned media per country"
  • Companies presence

Why matter ?

Corporate surveillance is creating unprotected collection of sensitive data, from the long term analysis of apparently meaningless information. These entities are able to describe in details everyone.


Laws at the moment can't protect you or you society
We can measure the phenomena and provide solutions.

Information Warfare

The term Information Warfare (IW) is primarily a United States Military concept involving the use and management of information and communication technology in pursuit of a competitive advantage over an opponent.

In order to do that, you need: knowing your target (profiling) and influence the target knowledge development (algorithm ranking influence)

Narratives available

  • 1. Classical one: “user vs companies” tackling digital right to privacy, checking current legal standard and user self defense
  • 2. Political and social: “mass vs company”: you can't relay on self defense, and you can measure how much of the population is predictable or influenciable by foreing service.
  • 3. “user vs state”: Classical like “1” but with different target of interest, can be used neat area of economic or geographic conflicts.
  • 4. “state vs state”: The geopolitical, is like 2 but can be interpolated with current and past state level agreements or conflict
  • 5. “state vs organization”: can be used to tackle companies, NGO or group that are explicitly threaten by a state actor.

Next possible steps

Still without prioritization

EDRI/BoF

Talk with these activist and figure out which data/analysis can help their job.

  • Can bring to join funding.
  • Their network get aware of our analysis.
  • Are use cases.

"Some of my students can do viz".

Interaction Design - ArtEZ

http://www.artez.nl/design/Interaction-Design
  • Free visualisation for us, usable in our website.
  • Someone beside me using the data: external feedback/criticism.
  • Focus them in "Contextual" viz.

Company only analysis

If the infrastructure analysis makes the support hard, we can just get rid of that,and map the most accessed 500 website per country

  • Quite easy (1 week of work ?)
  • Will permit -yay!- some global consideration
  • Still we have "where data are gone" and companies details, we just loose infrastructure analysis

Javascript intrusiveness

At the moment the third party world is considered all the same.

  • There are a lots of differences, (an image is not damaging like a tracking script)
  • Providing shared of invasiveness will be possible address the "unfair market" and not "all the market is bad"
  • Will be an innovative results for the privacy/security community

Legal analysis of Countries

Are all the countries the same ? we don't think so, ranking them and consider the law which our data are subjected

  • A taxonomy of the state is required (some index exists already)

Digital security trainings

Map history + tools infrastructure usage

  • Will make a lots clearer which are the potential enemies

For example: from Saudi Arabia if you use CCC Jabber server, you pass through ITA/USA/UK networks. A good reason to use Jabber with a Tor proxy.

Twitter integration

The Least concerned media in #Canada is #Dharmatoday http://trackography.org/something

From #Germany network you touch #USA infrastructure 95% of the time you navigate on a media http://trackography.org/something

  • These twitter message can be automatically generateed and sent.
  • Can be triggered onece a while, or every time a new result is delivered.
  • Will increase trackography visibility and possibility to get partnerships.

Bonus Track...

How a profile looks like ?