Did you know? Twitter knows when you buy eggs, milk, and cheese in the REAL WORLD?
https://twitter.com/compgenius999/status/810245260349767680
Today I learned that Twitter tracking is as invasive, if not even WORSE than Facebook. How is that possible?
I was browsing through my Tweet's, and wanted to figure out what my most "liked" tweet was, so I went through Twitter Analytics, and I started to notice some odd things...
The first thing I saw is that they were fully aware of your gender, your primary interests, and your phone provider. Not that bad... But then, I noticed as I looked into the other tabs, such as Consumer Behaviour and Demographics, that they track much much more than you think.
It start's to get creepy. One of the things they track is your house price. That's right. They know exactly how much your house is worth. It's likely they figure out your primary address by the location you tweet from the most. To top it off, they take this location and run it against housing area sites, and figures out the average value in that area, if not for that exact house you're in. Now advertisers who want to sell you houses know exactly the kind-of price range you want...
The next strange part is the income. They know your household income. Somehow. I don't know if they figure this out based on what you post about on twitter, e.g "look at my new lambourghini", "lives in london" etc. - or if third parties, such as credit agencies attempt to corroborate your information, e.g. Joe Smith living in Birmingham who's age 23 could be matched perfectly.
Here's the weirdest part. They know exactly what you buy. In real life. Not just online. Seriously how many people buy Eggs and Milk online? How many people tweet about the eggs and milk they just bought? Very very few. The only way they could possibly know that my twitter audience likes to buy Eggs and Milk would either be:
They track your physical location 24/7, even when you're not tweeting. Using this data with store aisle maps, they can figure out that you spent 20 seconds in the Eggs aisle, and 25 seconds in the Milk aisle, likely meaning you were deciding on what milk and eggs to pick up.
They use similar third party data sharing to the speculated credit agency checks, and attempt to relate it to loyalty card data from stores such as Walmart, Target, and Tesco/Sainsbury's (UK).
This is followed by their "Automotive Purchase" section, which tells me the demographics of my audience's cars. It can tell me how many people own a car that's over 4 years old, how many purchased a car in the past 6 months, 6-12 months, 12-24 month etc.
These analytics opened my eyes to just how invasive Twitter's tracking and data sharing was. It's quite terrifying really, and makes me glad that I have never used the app, so I have avoided much of their location tracking.
This, is one of the many benefits of STEEM. It's unlikely that Steemit will ask for too many personal details, even in the future. Right now they require your phone and email, but luckily that can be bypassed with AnonSteem. There is also no location tracking on Steemit, so I can be sure that they aren't trying to watch me in the aisle of a supermarket as I attempt to purchase some cheese.
Remember to always be aware that these social networks are always trying to track you. To reduce their invasiveness, enable social blocking in your ad-blocker (I recommend µBlock Origin), and install anti-tracking extensions such as the EFF's Privacy Badger. To top it off, you can also use a VPN. Unlike TOR, VPN's often work fine, I've even made plenty of financial transactions without being flagged by my bank using PrivateInternetAccess and various other VPNs.
As you can see stated in some of your screenshots: Value based on 17.6% match rate from Twitter Partners
This is purely generated based on data supplied by those partners. You can find them here: https://partners.twitter.com/en/find-a-partner.html
It's not like twitter tracks the aisle you are in. Undoubtly facebook also enriches your profile like this with third party advertising partners. As does google and all the others.
House prices, could indeed be based on your location you tweet from. Sounds logical. I could actually also tell that to you, just by using the Twitter API and then matching up with data from some real estate website.
Income: most probably one of these partners matches up names with linkedin profiles and such and gets ballpark figures for job descriptions. etc etc.
There is no 'they' on Steemit. It is we, us, the blockchain. You don't need an email or phonenumber perse to register on Steemit, a facebook or reddit account also works, or you can use your service as you say... Steemit Inc is also not using that to track you, but to limit account creation abuse IMHO.
But yeah, in general, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Whenever the service is free, you are the product.
I wholeheartedly disagree. With every ounce of my being. This is closer to the truth:
On Steemit, "They" is anybody who can read the blockchain. In other words, "they" is everyone. On Twitter, only Twitter knows everything about you. On Steemit, everyone does.
truth. thx phil!
steemit.com uses some fonts served by google. Your usage here is tracked by google at least.
http://fontfeed.com/archives/google-webfonts-the-spy-inside/
not saying this is good, bad or indifferent, just saying that yes, there is definitely outside tracking.
edit after looking for a couple minutes:
Not sure what information it keeps from other sources, but if you signup with facebook, it looks like steemit.com also keeps your registered name on fb and facebook email.
True. And also google analytics :)
Privacy Badger blocks their cookies, which helps to reduce their ability to track you, especially if you have a VPN turned on.
Yeah, i use something similar. For steemit at least, that looks like the extent of the tracking here (which is great). Though, oddly enough, steemit doesn't seem to be looking at your facebook data from your browser. It looks like steemit saves the name and email of the facebook account you signed up with. Im not sure who this information is or potentially could be shared with, but yes, they definitely collect and store it.
I used a sock-puppet facebook account to sign up for steemit, for privacy reasons, and the name and email from that account still seem to appear in pages served to me, even though im logged into my real FB account while browsing.
Thank you for your input.
Yeah, you know why your bank didnt flag you?
because the merchant recognized your broweser fingerprint. A vpn will protect your privacy only from someone who doesnt really care enough to figure out who you are. Nearly every bank uses fingerprinting. Nearly every major online store (amazon, walmart, bestbuy, etc) and every social network uses it too.
There's obviously some level of fingerprinting, can't really be avoided entirely.
But with things like uBlock and Privacy Badger, their tentacles can be at least reduced, e.g. random news sites can't link you back to Facebook because uBlock is blocking their share/like buttons, and Privacy Badger is preventing any tracking cookies from Facebook.
I feel like youre overestimating how many sites use cookies for tracking anymore, and how many use canvas fingerprinting. Sites like twitter, facebook, and even whitehouse.gov (<- super creepy) nearly all banks, nearly all payment proccessors, nearly all online retailers, all employ canvas fingerprinting.
Yeah, they definitely can. Because FB and twitter collect and share your fingerprint (as do the news sites) on pay databases. A news site can collect your fingerprint with a simple script, upload it to a database, and look up the site info for every other site that has also detected that fingerprint. Often, this is free in exchange for the site sharing the information, though sometimes its a pay service. Most plugins and privacy SW will not detect this if the fingerprint script is served from the site being visited.
yeah to use bank/paypal i log off the VPN
Actually, though, this brings up an interesting point. Obviously, if someone uses steemit.com, their IP address is visible (and most likely recorded as part of regular logs)
Is the same true with using the steem blockchain? Like, if i use the CLI to post, read or vote, does the protocol record the originating IP like, say, bitcoin does?
Nope. And beginning early next year we will be anonymizing IPs in our web logs, including retroactively. We don't want to store that kind of detailed user information.
It's possible AWS will still keep some internally (we will be hosted there soon), but I doubt they'll be mapped to usernames.
thats actually really awesome.
that said, typically the way it works (at least to my non-technical understanding) is that the hosting provider has to store all the raw data coming in and going out as a matter of law. So the question isn't "is the ip info mapped to usernames", its "is the ip info mappable to usernames"
The answer is probably yes, but there's no reasonable way i can think of to stop that from being the case.
Not in the United States, but my guess would be there are some back-room deals (or just government assets inside Amazon's organization) that make sure they get a realtime feed of all that data anyway.
I was like 85% sure you were wrong about the US not having a data retention law, but i checked and youre right. TIL
No
Haha beat them at their own game from now on I will leave the phone in the car, then they dont get to track me at all. Or turn off the phone before I get out of the car, I mean really I don't send tweets I only have twitter to follow a BTC faucet, and they dont send much out.
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
Always good to see more research into this, I think the more people know, the less they'll stand for this. EFF's Privacy Badger is one of the very best. To be honest, it's just not enough to use the blockers, but it's the best we have, more or less.
I also like uMatrix (for Firefox and Chrome)
good i dont have their app installed, only use it on stationary computer and by VPN :)
lol I should start doing it this way as I only track a BTC faucet with twitter, but really I do not use it lol.
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For the most part, the only thing I use my debit card for is gas.. If enough people hold enough cash it should put pressure on the fractional reserve.
The scary thing about today's world is that we can tell people a lot about ourselves without directly telling them anything. I read a study a couple years ago that found that Netflix can look at your movie and TV preferences and deduce your
All this, and you don't have to directly tell them a thing. Just imagine what someone could learn about you by querying your Steemit history that is 100% public and permanently inscribed on the blockchain?