Don't be a glasshole
November 29, 2016 6:49 PM   Subscribe

Mozilla and the Tactical Technology Collective have created a popup storefront in lower Manhattan called The Glass Room: Looking Into Your Online Life. Situated somewhere along the education—art spectrum, The Glass Room provides "a place to consider how you use technology and how those behind technology use you" (as put on the landing page). Resources include a variety of workshops about technology and privacy, along with a book of leaked passwords and other art installations.
posted by redct (15 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
I was just at the opening do for this, and even though I knew Google knows me, I wasn't aware of just how well Google knows me. It made me very uncomfortable. There are other scary installations, like the set-up where passers-by to the pop-up "non-Apple store" gallery (as the Mozilla exec who opened the party called it) on Mulberry Street were getting their phones picked up from the WiFi, and having their phone names and what they were connecting to being shown on a screen near the bar. So obviously they picked up on MY phone while I was queued briefly outside!

They're exhibiting a chip that, once implanted, can allow someone else to remotely control a woman's fertility for 16 years! WHAT!?!?

There were also animations that explained how health insurance companies, credit card companies and all sorts of sundry institutions are tracking your social media to assess your health and credit risks. Something as personality quirk-driven as not being very specific in making plans with your friends on FB can put you in a higher-risk category for certain services and force you into paying higher premiums for health insurance. And since most people aren't aware how closely companies are mining this data, they can't fight any decisions those companies make regarding the extension of services. You don't know who's watching. Even in Messenger, or Kik, or Snapchat, or Instagram... Peter Thiel is one person they named outright as someone who has access to a lot of data and has not a qualm in selling it all to the FBI. I was very surprised to see that my old LinkedIn password wasn't in the books of breached data from a few years back.

I didn't feel like I could investigate too much because there were a lot of appetizers, napkins, and drinks scattered by party-goers on the installation tables, but I intend to go back and explore this further when I have a few days off later this month. The whole time I was there, even as Baratunde Thurston cracked his "He Who Shall Not Be Named" jokes, all I could think was, what if someone like Bannon or Sessions or whomever decides to use all this info against people, and you don't know what's going on until the armed people who've decided to go along with their mess come barging through your door to do whatever, because they found you from your posting online? I suppose that's why you speak out anyway, knowing what the risk is. If you're online, they know about you. THEY KNOW ALL ABOUT YOU.

As the song goes, "It's too late..."
posted by droplet at 7:51 PM on November 29, 2016 [6 favorites]


THEY KNOW ALL ABOUT YOU.

I've maintained a reasonably minimal online presence and always opted out of most everything where I can, on general principles. Still, I'm genuinely curious to know exactly how much of my personal information really is being nabbed. I have no idea how to reliably determine that; most companies will claim they aren't keeping any info about me because I asked them not to, but I'm not totally naive.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:26 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


Greg_Ace: Some jurisdictions require firms to reveal the data held on individuals. In Aus it's a provision of the Privacy Act. Of course, you need to identify the firms in question (and I'm going to guess you're in the USA which is unlikely to be one of those jurisdictions).
posted by pompomtom at 1:51 AM on November 30, 2016


(of course, if you enquire with a firm that didn't hold something on you, well, they would then...)
posted by pompomtom at 1:57 AM on November 30, 2016


This "Tracking ... So What?" listicle is concise & simplified but definitely useful.
posted by chavenet at 3:02 AM on November 30, 2016


Ease your mind. Some day you will die, and all of the time and resources these companies spent tracking and analyzing your habits will be utterly wasted. Victory is yours.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:26 AM on November 30, 2016 [4 favorites]


Heh, for most values of "they" they probably assume I'm dead unless Google is selling deanonymized stuff they claim they only sell in anonymized form. I haven't logged on to Facebook in years, and don't use LinkedIn or anything else that has my name attached, aside from a domain name that has an address associated with it I haven't lived at in a decade.
posted by wierdo at 6:29 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


Previously (from a different iteration of this concept)
posted by mbrubeck at 8:04 AM on November 30, 2016


...getting their phones picked up from the WiFi, and having their phone names and what they were connecting to being shown on a screen near the bar. So obviously they picked up on MY phone while I was queued briefly outside!
There was a cool project here at MIT where some students grabbed the MAC addresses of wi-fi cards along with signal strength from a few judiciously placed access points and managed to triangulate device location within a meter or so indoors.
posted by redct at 9:25 AM on November 30, 2016


How do you think Skyhook and Google Maps locate you without GPS? ;)

Google has been creepily accurate with its wifi triangulation in many locations for the better part of a decade now. At the last place I lived it got me within 10 feet or so anywhere in my neighborhood.
posted by wierdo at 2:32 PM on November 30, 2016


That's one reason I have Location turned off unless I'm in the car and using GPS to navigate. I also severely limit most apps' permissions plus I use a firewall, and I have WiFi turned off unless I'm at home and connecting to my own network....not to mention disabling BlueTooth and NFC/Beam unless I'm actively using them.

Again, I know this doesn't make me totally opaque, but I do try to limit my info leakage to at least some reasonable extent.
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:15 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


If you're on recent Android also turn off WiFi scanning. It allows apps to scan for nearby APs even when WiFi is "off," although the intended purpose is for getting a course location when you have GPS disabled. It is kinda useful in that it allows location-aware notifications/reminders and the like without eating up as much battery as firing up the GPS chip.

FWIW, it's less privacy invasive than it used to be, at least with respect to third parties (Google obviously gets the list of nearby APs so it can query the database), since Android 5+ scans with a random MAC address, which prevents AP owners from tracking you by your phone's WiFi MAC unless you connect to their (or a nearby) AP. That's one thing iOS did right long before Android.

Personally, I'm less concerned about Google itself than I am other people with whom I have no relationship. At least Google notionally has to abide by their privacy policy and not sell my info to all and sundry, even if they are using it to target ads at me in a creepily effective way. Plus I trust their security a lot more than Target or Joe's Coffee Shop.
posted by wierdo at 7:57 PM on November 30, 2016


in a creepily effective way

You keep using that word...

turn off WiFi scanning

I finally found that under Location > (Menu icon) > Scanning.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:47 PM on November 30, 2016


Yeah, it seems appropriate to me. Google does lots of stuff that is both creepy and also quite good at doing what it is designed to do. Sometimes it's helpful to me, sometimes to their advertisers. On rare occasion their ad targeting even proves useful to me. But it's still creepy as fuck how well it seems to work in terms of putting the types of products I am thinking of purchasing in the short term in front of my face, especially when it isn't something I've already been searching for/researching.
posted by wierdo at 11:29 AM on December 1, 2016




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