On web user tracking of browsing patterns for personalised advertising

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems on 19/02/2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17445760.2017.1282480On today’s Web, users trade access to their private data for content and services. App and service providers want to know everything they can about their users, in order to improve their product experience. Also, advertising sustains the business model of many websites and applications. Efficient and successful advertising relies on predicting users’ actions and tastes to suggest a range of products to buy. Both service providers and advertisers try to track users’ behaviour across their product network. For application providers this means tracking users’ actions within their platform. For third-party services following users, means being able to track them across different websites and applications. It is well known how, while surfing the Web, users leave traces regarding their identity in the form of activity patterns and unstructured data. These data constitute what is called the user’s online footprint. We analyse how advertising networks build and collect users footprints and how the suggested advertising reacts to changes in the user behaviour.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

News as Surveillance

As inhabitants of the Information Age, we are increasingly aware of the amount and kind of data that technology platforms collect on us. Far less publicized, however, is how much data news organizations collect on us as we read the news online and how they allow third parties to collect that personal data as well. A handful of studies by computer scientists reveal that, as a group, news websites are among the Internet’s worst offenders when it comes to tracking their visitors. On the one hand, this surveillance is unsurprising. It is capitalism at work. The press’s business model has long been advertising-based. Yet, today this business model raises particular First Amendment concerns. The press, a named beneficiary of the First Amendment and a First Amendment institution, is gathering user reading history. This is a violation of what legal scholars call “intellectual privacy”—a right foundational to our First Amendment free speech rights. And because of the perpetrator, this surveillance has the potential to cause far-reaching harms. Not only does it injure the individual reader or citizen, it injures society. News consumption helps each of us engage in the democratic process. It is, in fact, practically a prerequisite to our participation. Moreover, for an institution whose success is dependent on its readers’ trust, one that checks abuses of power, this surveillance seems like a special brand of betrayal. Rather than an attack on journalists or journalism, this Essay is an attack on a particular press business model. It is also a call to grapple with it before the press faces greater public backlash. Originally given as the keynote for the Washburn Law Journal’s symposium, The Future of Cyber Speech, Media, and Privacy, this Essay argues for transforming and diversifying press business models and offers up other suggestions for minimizing the use of news as surveillance

Understanding users' motivation for wearable activity tracker use

Personal monitoring devices such as activity and sports trackers are becoming increasingly popular. This could be explained by the increasing versatility of the sensors used in wrist wear trackers, smart wristwatch and smartphones (monitoring with increasing parameters and higher precision) and their associated software applications. However, while there is growing interest, recent research has indicated that the use of such devices and applications does not necessarily sustain in the long term. This thesis presents a study of users’ experiences of some users of these devices. Taking a qualitative inquiry, this thesis presents an understanding of the use of these devices, and the psychological needs they satisfy. Grounded on insights from this qualitative inquiry, we derive ideas for the design of physical and sports trackers with the intention of sustaining long-term engagement.Os dispositivos de monitorização pessoais, tipo activity trackers ou sports trackers estão se tornando cada vez mais populares. Isso pode ser explicado pela crescente versatilidade dos sensores usados em trackers de pulso, relógios de pulso inteligentes e smartphones (monitorização com parâmetros crescentes e maior precisão) e seus aplicativos de software associados. No entanto, embora haja um interesse crescente, pesquisas recentes indicaram que o uso de tais dispositivos e aplicativos não se mantém a longo prazo. Esta tese apresenta um estudo das experiências de alguns utilizadores desses dispositivos. Fazendo uma consulta qualitativa, esta tese apresenta uma compreensão sobre o uso desses dispositivos e as necessidades psicológicas que eles satisfazem. Baseado em ideias desse inquérito qualitativo, derivamos ideias para o design de activity trackers e sports trackers com a intenção de manter o envolvimento a longo prazo

On Web User Tracking: How Third-Party Http Requests Track Users' Browsing Patterns for Personalised Advertising

On today's Web, users trade access to their private data for content and services. Advertising sustains the business model of many websites and applications. Efficient and successful advertising relies on predicting users' actions and tastes to suggest a range of products to buy. It follows that, while surfing the Web users leave traces regarding their identity in the form of activity patterns and unstructured data. We analyse how advertising networks build user footprints and how the suggested advertising reacts to changes in the user behaviour.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1605.0653

Exercise as Labour: Quantified Self and the Transformation of Exercise into Labour

The recent increase in the use of digital self-tracking devices has given rise to a range of relations to the self often discussed as quantified self (QS). In popular and academic discourse, this development has been discussed variously as a form of narcissistic self-involvement, an advanced expression of panoptical self-surveillance and a potential new dawn for e-health. This article proposes a previously un-theorised consequence of this large-scale observation and analysis of human behaviour; that exercise activity is in the process of being reconfigured as labour. QS will be briefly introduced, and reflected on, subsequently considering some of its key aspects in relation to how these have so far been interpreted and analysed in academic literature. Secondly, the analysis of scholars of “digital labour” and “immaterial labour” will be considered, which will be discussed in relation to what its analysis of the transformations of work in contemporary advanced capitalism can offer to an interpretation of the promotion and management of the self-tracking of exercise activities. Building on this analysis, it will be proposed that a thermodynamic model of the exploitation of potential energy underlies the interest that corporations have shown in self-tracking and that “gamification” and the promotion of an entrepreneurial selfhood is the ideological frame that informs the strategy through which labour value is extracted without payment. Finally, the potential theoretical and political consequences of these insights will be considered