Ever wondered how you can read news online for free while you need to pay for print? Designing, hosting and maintaining a site costs money, so how are sites – with a few exceptions like New York Times – accessible for free?
Well, it depends on what you see as cost. For most, it’s about money i.e., if we don’t pay in cash, it’s for free. But there’s a bigger cost we pay a bit too willingly: Our own data & identities. Turns out, the internet’s free by design, largely due to a model called surveillance capitalism [explore]
To explore further on some terms, tap on “Explore” wherever you can find it!
This model has kept the internet largely free as we know it, and why you can probably watch your favourite YouTuber’s videos for free, without paying a subscription fee as you would for Cable TV. It’s also why your Instagram feed is filled with posts & reels you tend to get engrossed in. As the term might suggest, it’s not all good though, with the trade-off being our habits being monitored almost throughout the internet.
What’s this surveillance capitalism?
On the surface, it’s almost exactly what you might make from the two words. Your habits are monitored, and used to generate profits. It’s why Google – which invented this model in 2001 – profitable in billions even when you don’t pay for most of its services, like Gmail or Maps.
In technical terms, as it’s termed by Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff in 2014, surveillance capitalism is an economic system centered around the commodification of personal data with a core purpose of making profit. Simply put, whatever you do on the internet is raw material for corporations to mine, sell & profit off from.
What’s the problem with it, if it helps keep internet free?
As the proverbial – and cliché – saying goes, if you’re not paying for something, you’re probably the product. And it holds true in surveillance capitalism.
(i) You have almost no choice in it, including the one to say no.
If men are stereotypically bad at understanding consent, CEOs of big-tech companies don’t get it at all (and they’re all men, which doesn’t help matters). For starters, you have no easy way to reject this mode of surveillance, meaning you’ve no choice but to use the internet like walking a street lined with CCTV cameras, all trained on you.
By design, the system is about making choices on behalf of users – glorified by terms like ‘recommendations’ and ‘personalization’ – like the product you may buy, by stripping away your ability to decide freely. Just think of your typical Amazon search. Most of the search results on top are sponsored i.e., ads; someone paid for the top slot so you see it first. And then there’s its ‘Products Related To This Item’ & ‘Frequently Bought Together’ sections, which too have sponsored posts.
Long story short, you can’t distinguish between ads (placed higher up in search results) and organic product pages (found much lower down) with Amazon’s by-design ‘dark patterns’ in form of poorly visible ad-labels. Do you then, really get to choose what you get home, or is it… Amazon’s Choice?
Sponsored products (read ads) appear first on your page where you’ll likely spend more of your time, as main ‘Results’ whereas organic ones are much lower placed, under ‘More Results’.
Let’s say, I stalk you for years, sell that data to people you don’t know. These people soon approach you, knowing your most intimate secrets to get you do what they want you to. You cannot say no to any of this.
Now, replace me from that, with Google, Meta & Amazon (among others). Welcome to the internet.
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Let’s talk Google. While its makes its privacy policy nice and rosy on the eye, it offers very little in privacy controls that help you explore the internet without it (FYI, Google’s code is present in some ~57% of all sites and 88% of apps from Play Store, so it’s got a good idea on what you do online), or other companies following you around. Too bad then, that Chrome’s incognito mode doesn’t protect your privacy from trackers (at all) and has been a joke for its own employees. Worse, Google is not alone in tracking people, and is joined by big-tech companies like Meta and Amazon, which is rampantly scaling up its ad-business. Count in the company touting “Privacy. That’s iPhone” too.
Context: The Google-Facebook duopoly has controlled the internet (subsidized by ads) over the digital ad-space for over a decade, with over 50% of share in the digital-ad space. It’s only now showing signs of weakening, and that too due to inflation and two other monopolistic companies Apple & Amazon ramping their ad-businesses. [explore]
(ii) They know too much about you. And your data is frequently misused.
Second come concerns with what companies can do with your data. Meta follows a last-bencher’s slacker attitude by collecting as much data as possible, not knowing where it goes or what it’s even used for, and sharing user-data with governments almost on demand. Speaking of the Indian government – second only to the US for amount of data requests made to Meta – which asked for people’s data for some fifty-five thousand times (in the first half of 2022 alone), Meta/Facebook shared “some data” nearly 66% of the times.
Meta’s not alone. And news of data breaches or misuse are fairly – and worryingly – getting common. For example, Twitter reportedly saw 400 Million accounts’ details put up for sale, for $200,000 by a hacker. Here’s another Twitter data breach, as recent as Jan 06, 2023. Then there’s TikTok’s parent ByteDance, which has been found accessing data, such as IP addresses, of US Journalists. And Google – no stranger to privacy concerns – just agreed to pay $400 Million in a privacy lawsuit on its location tracking, despite people explicitly opting out of it. The list goes on, for almost every company you can name. Plus, this is in addition to all the vast troves of data companies tend to collect from us; here’s a taste:
A simplified view of all the stuff Google knows about you. Can you name something that’s not here? Hard time, eh? Source: Google’s Privacy Policy.
Quick heads-up: It’s not always about you doing something wrong/illegal to be concerned about big-tech companies monitoring you. It’s about them doing the same. Big-tech’s comfortable with paying fines for violating laws, and continuing to seek loopholes in them to exploit.
Few people sum up surveillance capitalism as much as Andy Rubin, co-founder of the Android OS, did in a 2013 comment: “We don’t monetize the things we create…we monetize users.”
(iii) It’s a threat to your democracy, and then some.
Perhaps my biggest motivation behind writing this piece, is how it’s just not about getting you to buy more stuff or see more ads. It’s about our existence.
Surveillance capitalism is an “assault on human autonomy” as per Shoshana Zuboff, who coined the term as the model slowly shifts towards actuating – or influencing– people’s decisions- by “tuning, herding and conditioning our behaviour with subtle and subliminal cues, rewards, and punishments that shunt us toward their most profitable outcomes”.
Take how sites require us to dive through sub-menus and/or click several toggles to reject cookies, when accepting them is a bold ‘Accept All’ button. Some don’t even provide any means to reject cookies. Most privacy policies are just deep quicksands of legalese no mortal can understand, so if you’re a human, you probably aren’t reading one. And then, many privacy settings are buried deep in the settings page, with intentionally misleading language designed to make you go for less-private options. I’m looking at you, Google.
Moves like these nudge you to forego our privacy for convenience, even if in real life, you’re concerned about your privacy (If you close your bathroom door while bathing, you probably do so; even for your most intimate searches, like on mental health, you get no such doors to prevent unwanted snooping).
At scale, the sheer extent of digital surveillance can be used to predict our offline lives as well, eroding our freedom of thought by deciding choices for us based on our habits.
Social Media apps thrive off surveillance capitalism, and deploy a variety of manipulative tactics. Instagram’s infinite scrolling feed is designed to keep you hooked for longer, so you can be shown more ads. Snapchat encourages people to have ‘streaks’ of daily posting so you’re using the app daily. If you have opened Instagram only to forget why you were there in the first place and spend an easy thirty minutes before realizing the time spent, it’s not your fault. It’s by design.
Just ask the co-creator of the ubiquitous Like button, Justin Rosenstein who thinks that those innocent push notifications from your social media apps are “the most insidious form of social media manipulation.” According to him, “The vast majority of push notifications are just distractions that pull us out of the moment. They get us hooked on pulling our phones out and getting lost in a quick hit of information that could wait for later, or doesn’t matter at all.”
As Zuboff puts it in a 2019 interview with The Harvard Gazette, “Democracy is also eroded from without, as surveillance capitalism represents an unprecedented concentration of knowledge and the power that accrues to such knowledge. They know everything about us, but we know little about them.”
It makes sense when you piece together each instance together, to see how your life is controlled by a few men in coats. When you take Amazon deciding and/or manipulating your purchases, Instagram (to be fair, most social media apps) controlling what you see and know (ft. risk of government censorship in authoritarian regimes, like how China monitors and takes down dissenting video from its YouTube alternative, Youku), Netflix targeting you with shows you’re likely to binge-watch and Google/Meta usurping away your data from all corners of the internet, how much of freedom to choose and privacy do you have, really?
In short, it’s a threat to democracies worldwide, which thrives on people’s privacy and power to think and choose, by depriving societies of exactly that. You can read her full interview here.
A Casual Case Study: Indian News Sites
Most sites use analytics services like Google Analytics to know how their site’s being used; so if you’re seeing one or two trackers on a site, it’s pretty normal. To illustrate how you’re surveilled online, I picked news sites given their supposed role in a democracy of informing the people and help you make unbiased decisions, when their very model is a risk to democracy and free thought as we have just observed.
To measure how some Indian news sites track their users, I used The Markup‘s free & open-source tool, Blacklight. The tool checks the number of ad-trackers present, number of third-party cookies and whether the site allows Google and/or Meta to monitor your online activity, among other tracking methods.
Before we make sense of the numbers, we need to first clear a few (easy) basics. When you load a site, you are loading several pieces of code from trackers & sites you didn’t. Say, when you type in hindustantimes.com, these are some third-party scripts (pieces of code not from the site you visit) that are loaded alongside with it:
Almost everything you see in red, excluding a few, are third-party scripts blocked by uBlock Origin that are mainly used to profile your habits, and target ads based on that data for revenue. Note: Scripts from Amazon and Google, even if you aren’t using either of them here.
This is done with usually with tracking scripts (that monitor your taps, time spent on sections of the site and other activity) working together with third-party cookies [explore]. Third-party cookies are stored in your browser, by ad-networks to link your browser & past browsing activity with present i.e., link your habits across time & sites. Say, both Hindustan Times & NDTV use Google Analytics, so big-G knows that you visited both sites and then some, like what you tend to like based on your search query. Combined, it can form a profile of your opinions and target you accordingly.
If you are one of the many who taps ‘Accept All Cookies’ on that cookie pop-up, you’re effectively opening the doors many of these scripts to track you freely; think keeping your home’s doors open for everyone who wants to have a peek inside it. More on this in a moment.
And for a baseline, as per Blacklight’s survey of ‘popular websites’ conducted in September 2020, about half of them allow “Google Analytics (and thereby Google) to follow you across the internet” with 33% of sites allowing Facebook/Meta to track you. As for trackers, Blacklight says it detected an average of 7 ad-trackers and 3 third-party cookies, which are used to surveil your online activity often by ad-networks. You can learn more about Blacklight’s methodology & limitations here.
With those figures for reference, here’s how some Indian news sites are tracking their users, as of Jan 01, 2023:
Of these, only The Wire has less than Blacklight’s detected average number of ad-trackers, and on-par amount of third-party cookies. While that doesn’t make it a privacy-respecting site, it certainly appears that way when compared to some other sites (at least, from this tiny tiny list of six). NDTV is concerning in particular, as it beats the second-worst offender Hindustan Times by a long distance and uses canvas fingerprinting, a tracking technique that’s harder to defend against and can identify you even as you use tracking protections, by collecting details specific to your browser and/or device (eg: screen resolution, pixel density, etc.).
Do note, this is an illustrative, non-exhaustive comparison and the trend is not limited to just Indian sites. The tool failed to detect trackers in Times of India‘s site, which also deploys a huge amount of them and may have swung the results other way. And these numbers, as much they illustrate the scale of surveillance, shouldn’t be taken as the final word, given how web-tracking is a constantly evolving warfare between privacy-protecting browsers and sites.
What can you do about it?
Before we discuss some measures to resist surveillance capitalism, I want you to know that until companies change their models and respect people’s right to privacy, it’ll be a constant exchange of attack and defense. They track, you block, they track in some other way, you block in some other way and the loop continues. Systemic changes to ad-businesses will be the most effective moves for protecting your privacy, and freedom of thought.
That said, here are some individual measures that you can take now.
(i) Use your browser’s private mode for sites you don’t login to.
While private mode doesn’t make you anonymous or private by the slightest from trackers, they clear cookies as soon as you close the windows. This prevents sites from linking your current visit and activity with your past ones. Handy for news reading and online window-shopping stints.
These modes free you from the need to dive into the settings and clear cookies manually, speaking of which, now’s a good time to visit your browser’s stored cookies and clear them. Here’s how to do that for each browser [find out].
(ii) Switch to a privacy-respecting browser.
A browser like Brave or Firefox will block tracking content & third-party cookies, thereby limiting how much you’re tracked significantly, compared to Google’s Chrome. Invasive ads that slow down your browsing will be out of the way too and sites will load noticeably faster.
Speaking of private browsers, you can optionally read my review of Librewolf, a community-driven project that furthers Firefox’s privacy protection.
(iii) Switch to a privacy-respecting search engine
A privacy-focused search engine like DuckDuckGo, Brave Search or Startpage doesn’t collect your search history, location or any piece of information that can be linked with you. All that’s in stark contrast to Google, which collects all of that, and then some.
As an added bonus, none of these engines ‘personalize’ or target your search results as per your interests, so you can explore the internet like it’s a newspaper; same for everyone instead of being silos that isolate you from countering views or what others know about an issue.
Review all three search engines here.
(iv) Install uBlock Origin
uBlock Origin’s a content-blocking extension (and not an ad-blocker, even as it can block ads) that works alongside with Firefox or Brave’s native protections to block additional trackers and offer you granular control over what scripts to block, should you opt-in as an ‘Advanced User’ via its settings.
To configure uBlock Origin as per your convenience or privacy requirements, here’s the blocker’s own guide on how to do so, though it works by default just fine. Install it via Chrome’s Web Store or Mozilla’s Add-ons store.
EFF’s Privacy Badger & DuckDuckGo’s Privacy Essentials are also worth an install if you want some simplified control over tracker-blocking. Just don’t go overboard by installing too many tracker-blocking extensions, one or two will do.
(v) Use a VPN (optional)
If you can, get yourself a VPN that assigns you a different IP address every time you connect to its servers, thereby making it harder for sites to track you and link your past browsing habits. Note, a VPN doesn’t make you anonymous.
I’m not an expert on VPNs, so to help you understand how they work better, and choose one if needed, here’s a great how-to from Privacy Guides.
(vi) Use Tor
If you’re willing to put up with sites loading slowly and occasional CAPTCHA tests, Tor can provide you with anonymity that VPNs can’t. Tor bounces your traffic via multiple volunteer-run servers, so sites don’t know it’s you visiting their their pages.
Painful loading times aside, Tor’s effective to help you explore the internet without worrying about trackers. Visit Tor’s homepage from here.
(vii) Just go for print
The simplest move of the lot, is also the one that supports publishers for their efforts. Newspapers and magazines don’t track your reading habits, and neither do they target ads based on them.
Bonus, they help you get some off-screen time too.
(viii) Read Privacy Policies
Wait, hear me out. I don’t want you to read some four thousand words of legal jargon intentionally written to discourage you from doing so. But I want you to decide what software is right for you, and these policies help a lot with that.
For starters, just scroll through the entire page. If it’s too long, then it’s likely – if not always – collecting too much data. Then, you can hit Ctrl + F and look for keywords, like data ‘sharing’, data ‘collection’ and ‘advertisers’. The less, the better.
And then you got TOSDR, a community project that lets you assess a popular site’s privacy policy with a simple grading system. For example, Google Search gets an E (the lowest grade) while its rivals, DuckDuckGo and Startpage both get a A. Use TOSDR from here.
PS: The best privacy policies are often the simplest. And shortest. Here’s FlorisBoard, a Gboard alternative’s privacy policy, short and sweet [explore]. Compare that with Google’s.
Final thoughts: It’s creepy, but there’s hope.
Every time you go online, you are under constant surveillance. Be it Facebook/Google knowing which sites you visit to Amazon deploying a host of manipulative design tactics, big-tech companies have a financial reason to surveil you. While it’s rampant almost everywhere across the internet, I chose to focus on news site, which I find to be particularly heavy with tracking scripts than Blacklight’s average figures. I believe making sense of the world with news should be a private process, where you need not worry about being monitored.
That said, using trackers doesn’t make a site bad. In our case, journalism’s an exhaustive, resource-intensive process that needs to be sustained by one means or the other. I personally prefer Vox for its explanatory journalism that’s in-depth, simple to read and useful, even as it rivals NDTV for its use of tracking scripts (38 versus 41) and cookies (112 versus 111). Relying on targeted advertising is almost mandatory for quality, free-for-all journalism as it stands today.
It doesn’t have to be that way though. One great way to resist surveillance capitalism is by paying for our news (even if it’s digital) and donating to them if possible, thereby reducing journalists’ reliance on invasive advertising models that strip readers of our right to make sense of the world freely minus the surveillance.
Before you go deploying your privacy-protecting measures, here’s a bit of hope. As creepy as it is, surveillance capitalism might be finally seeing its end. Apple’s 2021 ‘App Tracking Transparency‘ apparently costs Meta in billions, $10 Billion in 2022 ad-sales as per Meta. The EU’s giving Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, a hard time too, forcing him to rethink Facebook’s business model of targeted ads with a $414 million fine on top of it. With Meta, one of the two big surveillance giants – the other being Google, also at the receiving end of several lawsuits – loosing its edge, partly due to an outlandish bet on the ‘metaverse’, there are reasons to be upbeat, and reclaim our privacy.
While all this would make advertising less profitable and force news publishers to rely on paywalls (that might hamper underprivileged people’s access to information), some of us can help news sites stay open with voluntary donations and amplifying their coverage. It’s a bit of a tall ask, but when done enough, we might have both free and quality, surveillance-free journalism i.e., the proverbial best of both worlds. Something to consider maybe, if possible?
PS: If you want more explainers on resisting surveillance and understanding digital privacy, subscribe to my newsletter, Hands Off My Data here. I write weekly-ish, on privacy alternatives that you can choose with some light reading.
Light <3