INDEX	Sunday July 25, 2021
Corporations reach into the cookies jar
A battle is taking place for the control of the internet.You probably would not believe that anything as vast and complex as the internet could be controlled, but it can. The issue is not whether it is controlled but who controls it. At the heart of this conflict is the humble cookie. This is a usually invisible piece of electronic stuff, perhaps a transparent pixel, that does seemingly mundane and probably useful work. So if you open some junk email advertising shoes, you may find shoe adverts on your Facebook timeline. Pop into your local sport retailer and check the weather on your mobile phone while you are standing in the payment queue (which probably involves setting your location), and those shoe adverts on your timeline start to promote running shoes. What you do and the places you visit, say a lot about you. Put all this information together and you can start to build up a useful profile. But that's only the beginning. Record billions, or more likely trillions, of these 'events' and add them to outcomes (purchases perhaps, job applications or holiday choices) and you can predict what people are going to do based on their current choices, using AI software.
	From bbc website https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53418898
	If you want to control the world, the humble cookie is the best way to do it. In fact, it's probably the only way to do it. Under pressure from Apple and Mozilla, who said, they were going to eradicate tracking cookies from their browsers, Google announced in January 2020 that it was going to follow suit by early 2022. In mid July 2021, the company suddenly announced it was going to delay the move until late 2023. Vinay Goel, privacy director at Google, put a brave face on the company's delay in getting rid of tracking cookies. Google is working on something called Privacy Sandbox, which is a way of tracking users for commercial purposes without invading their privacy. If it works, and it does sound a bit like the Philosopher's Stone, the people who own the code will more or less own the world too. Not only will the software be able to predict your product needs (and therefore sell you stuff) and discover how	much you will pay (you didn't realise people pay different amounts for their products on the internet?) it will also be the most powerful intelligence gathering system the world has ever seen. The only way out of this mess is for someone to create a search engine that charges users.This could be branded as the offering of a charity, which would obtain substantial revenue by charging a subscription for access to the search engine... a 21st century version of the charity shop. The next time someone tells you information wants to be free, explain that free means owned by the corporations: or to put it another way, so far as we are concerned, freedom is just another world for nothing left to lose. Sources: Private Eye No. 1551. 9 July-22 July 2021, page 19. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57611701 If you get a 404 error click this link for text from this page.
INDEX
Sunday July 25, 2021