The Art of Tracking: A Conversation about Surveillance and Privacy

How and I said it's because of the network so essentially you have tagged someone and saying that they have come to this location if you just look at their where their mobile is situated because if they have their location GPS on you can find to you know a very fine point where they are and thus where the rest of us are. So, it was a really interesting kind of point to discuss on a technical kind of level I would be interested in learning about other bits of how we can un i don't know switch up other tracking elements to try and make it even more kind of underground i suppose. But yeah I think I'd be interested in sort of multi-sited having other kind of advocates who'd like to i don't know to do it do one as well I guess.

One of the things that we were talking about was the lack of transparency from companies and from government that we don't know how how accurate or how well these tracking things work and how what we can do to you know either take back control or or if we're happy with them using that data than letting them use it. But the feedback loops of these of the tracking technologies are so um obfuscated we might we do see on a regular basis you know personalized advertising for us and that's probably the clearest feedback loop that we see of tracking technology. So, if I went on Amazon and I was looking at i don't know a pencil case and then suddenly that came up on my Facebook I said okay well I know that's there because I was looking at that earlier I might not understand how it got from there to there but I can kind of see the link sort of thing. But there are lots of other things that could be done with that data. I mean, you know recent um news revelations with Cambridge Analytica is that we aren't sure of what the in-between bit and what then the end product might be.

We live in a connected world and we like to be connected we like to be connected with other people it doesn't we don't necessarily like to be connected with tracking technologies. I mean, there are great ways that you can kind of mask things like you can mask your IP address using a VPN for example you can use the Tor browser if you wish although that does bring some other issues I mean some websites can break and not really work very well kind of thing. And then you always ask for like security kind of questions and those sorts of things um so there are things that you can these small things that you can do on a regular basis like I have a VPN on my phone with a VPN on my laptop and I prefer to use that wherever possible.

Some networks do block it which is frustrating but I mean I I know that completely disconnecting is not really worthwhile for me but I I've come to a point where I'm educated enough fortunately that I can pick and choose. I mean sometimes I do use Google Maps for um from you know searching or going somewhere you know using it as satnav essentially but at that point in time I'd rather get from A to B in a in the most efficient way possible than be late and lost and and just because I was like well I don't want Google to have that data. I mean I might be mindful about where I start my uh my journey I might actually pull away pull off onto a lay-by a bit down the road because I know generally the direction I'd like to go in but I mean I have I've come to a point where I understand that.

But there's so many people that don't I personally believe that this is a topic that other people should be kind of aware of and have an opinion of and also kind of have some you know tangible things that they can do. You know if they want to protect themselves but the whole idea of making it in this way is that it's kind of like a game that you although you know we don't have anything anything to hide which is a debate I really hate a good way to try and see whether it worked is if somebody could come along and try and hack it and see whether they they could find out where we were so then we kind of actually have sort of like sort of a baddie so to speak to kind of you know hide away from but again it's not about it's not necessarily about hiding but it's kind of testing the technology and seeing whether we do truly have the ability to kind of stop things from happening if we don't really want it to.

Let's Get This Out of the Way First

If your password is password you probably want to close out of your browser right now and change it and you know hang your head a little bit if there's any variation on the word password or has any of the numbers one two three four in order in it you need to delete those passwords maybe delete your account out of shame

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe idea around it was that people could join physically in a kind of disclosed location which was meant to be secretive and and underground although it wasn't literally the idea is that people would then have to come off grid as a way of participating in the class so that it was meant to be a hidden secretive kind of fight club kind of thing they would have to disconnect as it were from tracking and so that made the class even more secretive and a bit more kind of i don't know interesting i guess that was the idea some of the things that we talk about you know tracking technologies cookies and you know people cover their webcams you know for cyber security reasons and what better way to talk about those things is if we actually have to try and undo them as much as possible i sent them initially sort of very cryptic invitation to say would you be interested in joining an underground class that we're going to talk about privacy so i wanted to make it as a sort of a more of a game as possible i had actually read something similar in dragnac nation by julia anguin i was like i wonder if i could make that work unfortunately i did so i sent everybody a cryptic message about where where we were going to meet um because at that time i know that google was you know searching for keywords in in emails so i didn't want that to come up as you know i didn't want to fail before anybody even meet um because the the aim was that the location would be hidden i mean there's so many other things obviously using twitter and other things there are trackers but i wanted to try and keep the location itself as the thing that we were trying to protect the first step was i wanted them to download the tour browser tor literally stands for the onion router right it is an implementation of onion rooting and the institution i was working at the time you couldn't download it because because the network wouldn't let you so you have to go home and and you have to download it there but so they would download the tool browser then they would go onto my website where i had pre-loaded um some clips i wanted them to be looking at in in the class find the video that was you know video one buff it into their browser so that um we could save on bandwidth once they arrived then they'd have to open another tab log into twitter because then they'd probably go through its security kind of procedure so then he would have to log into twitter so that was all kind of set up i then wanted them to start disconnecting and so they would have to then close all of their um programs or tabs whatever they were using then they would turn off their wi-fi they would turn off their bluetooth if they had it connected on their computer and then they would kind of like just close the lid and put it in the back then i wanted them to look at all their other smart devices that they have so whether that's a smartphone smart watch whatever else they have and then i asked them to go on to their location services completely switched off location services and then ask them to turn off bluetooth turn off wi-fi and then finally put it into flight mode um i wanted to do it kind of step by step so that they kind of would say oh there's all these different things of why is she asking me to do that is there a reason for that is it is am i going to be tracked in some way using bluetooth am i going to be tracked using wi-fi i asked them to switch all that off before they started traveling because i didn't want there to be a certain drop-off point where all of the people would just be switching off because that then would then trigger okay it's there i purposely chose somewhere where i knew that you wouldn't get a wi-fi handshake there's only going to be one network they can connect to which is the one that i created through my mobile device through a vpn so the idea was they were connecting to tor through a vpn private hotspot that i had created for them in the first class there was a point of failure which was which was kind of nice because it was a learning point so what happened was that we were all there and we had the class and it was all you know reasonably kind of uh underground as it were and then somebody else who wasn't um who did not follow the procedure arrived late because somebody must have measured them this person arrived and they tweeted saying oh at blah blah blah has just arrived at hashtag privacyug and i said okay so now we and now our location is is compromised and then people said well well how and i said it's because of the network so essentially you have tagged someone and saying that they have come to this location if you just look at their where their mobile is situated because if they have their location gps on you can find to you know a very fine point where they are and thus where the rest of us are so it was a really interesting kind of point to discuss on a technical kind of level i would be interested in learning about other bits of how we can un i don't know switch up other tracking elements to try and make it even more kind of underground i suppose but yeah i think i'd be interested in sort of multi-sited having other kind of advocates who'd like to i don't know to do it do one as well i guess one of the things that we were talking about was the lack of transparency from companies and from government that we don't know how how accurate or how well these tracking things work and how what we can do to you know either take back control or or if we're happy with them using that data than letting them use it but the feedback loops of these of the tracking technologies are so um obfuscated we might we do see on a regular basis you know personalized advertising for us and that's probably the clearest feedback loop that we see of tracking technology so if i went on amazon and i was looking at i don't know a pencil case and then suddenly that came up on my facebook i said okay well i know that's there because i was looking at that earlier i might not understand how it got from there to there but i can kind of see the link sort of thing but there are lots of other things that could be done with that data i mean you know recent um news revelations with cambridge analytica is that we aren't sure of what the in-between bit and what then the end product might be we live in a connected world and we like to be connected we like to be connected with other people it doesn't we don't necessarily like to be connected with tracking technologies i mean there are there are great ways that you can kind of mask things like you can mask your ip address using a vpn for example you can use the tour browser if you wish although that does bring some other issues i mean some websites can break and not really work very well kind of thing and then you always ask for like security kind of questions and those sorts of things um so there are things that you can these small things that you can do on a regular basis like i have a vpn on my phone with a vpn on my laptop and i prefer to use that wherever possible some some networks do block it which is frustrating but i mean i i know that completely disconnecting is not really worthwhile for me but i i've come to a point where i'm educated enough fortunately that i can pick and choose i mean sometimes i do use google maps for um from you know searching or going somewhere you know using it as satnav essentially but at that point in time i'd rather get from a to b in a in the most efficient way possible than be late and lost and and just because i was like well i don't want google to have that data i mean i might be mindful about where i start start my uh my journey i might actually pull away pull off onto a lay-by a bit down the road because i know generally the direction i'd like to go in but i mean i have i've come to a point where i understand that but there's so many people that don't i personally believe that this is a topic that other people should be kind of aware of and have an opinion of and also kind of have some you know tangible things that they can do you know if they want to protect themselves but the whole idea of making it in this way is that it's kind of like a game that you although you know we don't have anything anything to hide which is a debate i really hate a good way to try and see whether it worked is if somebody could come along and try and hack it and see whether they they could find out where we were so then we kind of actually have sort of like sort of a baddie so to speak to kind of you know hide away from but again it's not about it's not necessarily about hiding but it's kind of testing the technology and seeing whether we do truly have the ability to kind of stop things from happening if we don't really want it to let's get this out of the way first if your password is password you probably want to close out of your browser right now and change it and you know hang your head a little bit if there's any variation on the word password or has any of the numbers one two three four in order in it you need to delete those passwords maybe delete your account out of shamethe idea around it was that people could join physically in a kind of disclosed location which was meant to be secretive and and underground although it wasn't literally the idea is that people would then have to come off grid as a way of participating in the class so that it was meant to be a hidden secretive kind of fight club kind of thing they would have to disconnect as it were from tracking and so that made the class even more secretive and a bit more kind of i don't know interesting i guess that was the idea some of the things that we talk about you know tracking technologies cookies and you know people cover their webcams you know for cyber security reasons and what better way to talk about those things is if we actually have to try and undo them as much as possible i sent them initially sort of very cryptic invitation to say would you be interested in joining an underground class that we're going to talk about privacy so i wanted to make it as a sort of a more of a game as possible i had actually read something similar in dragnac nation by julia anguin i was like i wonder if i could make that work unfortunately i did so i sent everybody a cryptic message about where where we were going to meet um because at that time i know that google was you know searching for keywords in in emails so i didn't want that to come up as you know i didn't want to fail before anybody even meet um because the the aim was that the location would be hidden i mean there's so many other things obviously using twitter and other things there are trackers but i wanted to try and keep the location itself as the thing that we were trying to protect the first step was i wanted them to download the tour browser tor literally stands for the onion router right it is an implementation of onion rooting and the institution i was working at the time you couldn't download it because because the network wouldn't let you so you have to go home and and you have to download it there but so they would download the tool browser then they would go onto my website where i had pre-loaded um some clips i wanted them to be looking at in in the class find the video that was you know video one buff it into their browser so that um we could save on bandwidth once they arrived then they'd have to open another tab log into twitter because then they'd probably go through its security kind of procedure so then he would have to log into twitter so that was all kind of set up i then wanted them to start disconnecting and so they would have to then close all of their um programs or tabs whatever they were using then they would turn off their wi-fi they would turn off their bluetooth if they had it connected on their computer and then they would kind of like just close the lid and put it in the back then i wanted them to look at all their other smart devices that they have so whether that's a smartphone smart watch whatever else they have and then i asked them to go on to their location services completely switched off location services and then ask them to turn off bluetooth turn off wi-fi and then finally put it into flight mode um i wanted to do it kind of step by step so that they kind of would say oh there's all these different things of why is she asking me to do that is there a reason for that is it is am i going to be tracked in some way using bluetooth am i going to be tracked using wi-fi i asked them to switch all that off before they started traveling because i didn't want there to be a certain drop-off point where all of the people would just be switching off because that then would then trigger okay it's there i purposely chose somewhere where i knew that you wouldn't get a wi-fi handshake there's only going to be one network they can connect to which is the one that i created through my mobile device through a vpn so the idea was they were connecting to tor through a vpn private hotspot that i had created for them in the first class there was a point of failure which was which was kind of nice because it was a learning point so what happened was that we were all there and we had the class and it was all you know reasonably kind of uh underground as it were and then somebody else who wasn't um who did not follow the procedure arrived late because somebody must have measured them this person arrived and they tweeted saying oh at blah blah blah has just arrived at hashtag privacyug and i said okay so now we and now our location is is compromised and then people said well well how and i said it's because of the network so essentially you have tagged someone and saying that they have come to this location if you just look at their where their mobile is situated because if they have their location gps on you can find to you know a very fine point where they are and thus where the rest of us are so it was a really interesting kind of point to discuss on a technical kind of level i would be interested in learning about other bits of how we can un i don't know switch up other tracking elements to try and make it even more kind of underground i suppose but yeah i think i'd be interested in sort of multi-sited having other kind of advocates who'd like to i don't know to do it do one as well i guess one of the things that we were talking about was the lack of transparency from companies and from government that we don't know how how accurate or how well these tracking things work and how what we can do to you know either take back control or or if we're happy with them using that data than letting them use it but the feedback loops of these of the tracking technologies are so um obfuscated we might we do see on a regular basis you know personalized advertising for us and that's probably the clearest feedback loop that we see of tracking technology so if i went on amazon and i was looking at i don't know a pencil case and then suddenly that came up on my facebook i said okay well i know that's there because i was looking at that earlier i might not understand how it got from there to there but i can kind of see the link sort of thing but there are lots of other things that could be done with that data i mean you know recent um news revelations with cambridge analytica is that we aren't sure of what the in-between bit and what then the end product might be we live in a connected world and we like to be connected we like to be connected with other people it doesn't we don't necessarily like to be connected with tracking technologies i mean there are there are great ways that you can kind of mask things like you can mask your ip address using a vpn for example you can use the tour browser if you wish although that does bring some other issues i mean some websites can break and not really work very well kind of thing and then you always ask for like security kind of questions and those sorts of things um so there are things that you can these small things that you can do on a regular basis like i have a vpn on my phone with a vpn on my laptop and i prefer to use that wherever possible some some networks do block it which is frustrating but i mean i i know that completely disconnecting is not really worthwhile for me but i i've come to a point where i'm educated enough fortunately that i can pick and choose i mean sometimes i do use google maps for um from you know searching or going somewhere you know using it as satnav essentially but at that point in time i'd rather get from a to b in a in the most efficient way possible than be late and lost and and just because i was like well i don't want google to have that data i mean i might be mindful about where i start start my uh my journey i might actually pull away pull off onto a lay-by a bit down the road because i know generally the direction i'd like to go in but i mean i have i've come to a point where i understand that but there's so many people that don't i personally believe that this is a topic that other people should be kind of aware of and have an opinion of and also kind of have some you know tangible things that they can do you know if they want to protect themselves but the whole idea of making it in this way is that it's kind of like a game that you although you know we don't have anything anything to hide which is a debate i really hate a good way to try and see whether it worked is if somebody could come along and try and hack it and see whether they they could find out where we were so then we kind of actually have sort of like sort of a baddie so to speak to kind of you know hide away from but again it's not about it's not necessarily about hiding but it's kind of testing the technology and seeing whether we do truly have the ability to kind of stop things from happening if we don't really want it to let's get this out of the way first if your password is password you probably want to close out of your browser right now and change it and you know hang your head a little bit if there's any variation on the word password or has any of the numbers one two three four in order in it you need to delete those passwords maybe delete your account out of shame\n"