From Googling to tweeting and online shopping — we investigate how companies track every click
Seeing adverts for things you're searched for online can be unnerving, but it's fast becoming part of everyday life
BROWSING Facebook on her laptop as she lay in bed one morning, Alice Purkiss felt chills go down her spine. As she scrolled through a friend’s wedding photos, she couldn’t escape the advert that kept catching her eye on the right-hand side of her screen. In bright blue letters it declared: “Make your will now.”
“It was totally jarring and shocked me to the core,” remembers Alice, now 29. Just two weeks earlier, in June 2015, she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. “To see those words was a terrifying reminder that I was in this life-threatening situation,” she says. “I remember veering from finding it grimly funny to feeling really dark about it all – I guess I was just in shock.”
The reason Alice came face to face with such an insensitive ad was that days earlier she had Googled treatment options for her condition.
Like it or not, seeing adverts for something we’ve searched for or chatted to a friend about has become a disconcerting part of modern life.
“If it feels as though the internet is spying on you, that’s because it is,” says Frederike Kaltheuner of Privacy International, a charity that campaigns for better laws to protect our data.
“In November 2017, a Princeton study revealed that over 400 of the world’s most popular websites record your every keystroke with ‘session replay scripts’.
"Such scripts can be used to log and then play back everything you’ve ever typed or clicked on.”
And this sort of tracking doesn’t end online. “Many people don’t realise that devices including smartphones, Kindles, activity trackers and voice-activated assistants like Amazon Echo are constantly amassing data about them,” says Frederike. “In 2015, Samsung was even forced to issue a warning to users not to discuss sensitive information in front of its smart TVs.”
But what happens to all of this info? In 2015, a study of popular apps found that about 90% of free software, and even 60% of paid, connect to third parties that collect personal data, such as Google Ads or Flurry.
“Think of your smartphone as a very effective tracking device that you willingly carry around with you everywhere you go,” explains Dr Justin Cappos, a cyber security expert and associate professor of systems and security at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering. “Most smartphone apps transmit data to third-party companies, and when you’re downloading an
app you’re allowing it access to your microphone, your photos, your GPS, your wireless, your Bluetooth, your fingerprint, your contacts list, your bank account… all very sensitive information.
“In short, everything you do online creates a detailed profile about you – your ethnicity, your sexuality, your personality – which is then sold and resold among different marketers and advertisers so they can build up an idea of who’s buying their products and target them perfectly.”
Hence, if you’re a woman in your 30s, you probably haven’t been able to watch a YouTube video recently without an ad for a certain pregnancy test, complete with massive gurgling baby. And such adverts have created a lot of dosh for search engines like Google – which made £61.4billion from advertising in 2016 alone.
For Alice, who works in social media marketing, simply Googling the terms “breast cancer” and “survival rates” triggered that will-making ad, along with adverts for private treatment for breast cancer.
“I’d found a small lump in my right breast in June and had been quite casual about it,” she remembers. “So was in total shock to be diagnosed with grade three breast cancer and told I would need a mastectomy followed by chemo and radiotherapy. I immediately started researching online about breast cancer in young women and what the survival rates are like. I felt so completely overwhelmed by what was happening and just wanted as much information as possible.”
It was when Alice was recovering from her mastectomy two weeks later that she noticed the targeted ads for wills popping up online. “I was just 27, had lost a breast and was still coming to terms with my diagnosis,” she says. “Through my job I knew exactly why the ad was there, but to be besieged like that was really hard to process. I had so much going on with my life, I just didn’t have the energy to complain to anyone about it. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t bother me.”
During the summer of 2015, copywriter Gemma Moore suffered a miscarriage at nine weeks – and shortly afterwards discovered she too was the target of online profiling.
“It left me heartbroken,” says Gemma, 32, who lives in London with her partner Nathan, 39.
“I felt so empty and couldn’t help but wonder who that little baby would have been. Then, out of nowhere, I was suddenly bombarded with baby ads on Facebook and YouTube. It was a constant reminder of what I’d been through, dragging up painful memories and making me upset all over again.”
The adverts continued for months, and Gemma found the only way to avoid them was either by using her mute button or by closing the page down completely.
“Even if I tried to silence them I’d still catch the first few seconds of an advert with a baby laughing or a woman smiling at a positive pregnancy test, and that was enough to reduce me to tears,” she remembers. “I’d have stopped going on to YouTube if it wasn’t for my daughter Jasmine, now four, enjoying the nursery rhyme videos so much.
“These targeted ads are too clever sometimes. I can only assume they knew I’d been pregnant as I’d looked for maternity clothes online, as I hadn’t made any announcement about it because it was such early days. There needs to be a way to opt out or an exclusion clause where you become exempt if you’ve Googled certain trigger words like ‘miscarriage’ or ‘stillbirth’. It can be very insensitive and upsetting for people struggling with grief and it’s all so that big businesses can make more money.”
After my miscarriage I was bombarded with baby adverts online
Of course, not everything you hear about online spying is true. Just last October, after a “Facebook is listening in” conspiracy theory went viral, the company was forced to deny that they used the microphone in people’s phones to show them relevant advertising.
“We don’t – and have never – used your microphone for ads. Just not true,” Facebook’s VP for ads, Rob Goldman, wrote on Twitter. Previously the company said in a statement: “We show ads based on people’s interests and other profile information – not what you’re talking out loud about.”
According to Frederike, this sort of global rumour-spreading highlights just how invasive some people feel ads or recommendations have become – after all, if they’re so accurate, they must be based on conversations being listened to by social media giants.
“The truth is the way we are being profiled is highly complex,” explains Frederike. “Our online and offline behaviour is being tracked and analysed in all sorts of ways by very sensitive algorithms – automated instructions or formulae computers use to analyse and process data.”
And while research has revealed that more than two-thirds of us have a negative view of targeted online advertising,* “surveillance capitalism”, as it’s been dubbed, is incredibly effective. According to one study of 3.5 million people, mostly women in the UK aged 18-40, it has the potential to boost sales by up to 50%.
Social scientist Sandra Matz, who co-wrote the study, believes that such mass persuasion could – and should – also be put to positive use, such as by helping people to save, get a pension or even lead healthier lives. “Yes, big data analytics has the potential for abuse if you exploit weaknesses in a person’s character,” Sandra explains. “But we want policymakers to focus on the positive uses. If you just shut down this technology, you would lose so much potential for helping people.”
It’s something Alice agrees with. Despite how upsetting her experience was, she acknowledges ways this technology could be beneficial. “Although it was invasive and insensitive, part of me thinks it is actually smart for companies to tailor these kinds of ads to people in the same situation as I was,” she admits. “I’m sure some people really will look at them and think: ‘Oh, yeah, I should make a will given the news I had last week.’”
At the moment, companies in the UK have to comply with data-protection laws about informed consent, which is why some websites will have pop-ups asking you to accept cookies. However, the Data Protection Act was passed in 1998 and technology has advanced considerably since then, which means there are loopholes. In May, however, EU data protection laws will undergo their biggest overhaul in two decades, threatening huge fines for businesses that don’t comply.
Even so, there are concerns about what companies might use our information for in the future. “Look at the how data-gathering techniques were used in both the EU referendum and the US election to target and craft messages to groups of persuadable voters based on insights gleaned from online data,” says robotics and privacy law expert Ryan Calo.
“Trump’s campaign spent over £50million on Facebook and Instagram advertising, fine- tuning commercials in order to reach certain voters, tweaking adverts an average of 60,000 times a day.”
Meanwhile, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office is currently investigating whether voters were unfairly influenced online by political campaigners in the run-up to the EU referendum in 2016.
Even if you don’t care about politics, you might care about the effect data analytics is having on your wallet. Researchers have already found evidence that some online retailers use profiling to discriminate against certain customers.** “If you’re identified as a high-value shopper, you’re likely to be steered towards more expensive products, or even charged more than other visitors for the same item,” explains Justin.
“For instance, companies can personalise prices in online shops by predicting how valuable someone might be as a customer in the long term or how much someone is probably willing to pay in a specific moment. There was a case a few years ago of iPhone and iOs customers being shown items that were more expensive compared with what other people were being shown, because Apple customers are associated with being willing to spend over the odds.”
Everything you do online creates a detailed profile about you – which is then sold
And that’s just the start of it. In the future, your online activity could be taken into consideration when you apply for a loan – or for a job. Something as innocent as searching for a medical condition – even out of mere curiosity – could cause your life insurance premiums to rocket, and you’ll never know why.
In 2016, the insurance company Admiral was forced to scrap plans to analyse people’s behaviour on Facebook in order to set premiums. “We’re not quite at the stage where if you type ‘pizza’ into your search engine your health insurance goes up, but we’re not far off,” says Justin.
Other than throwing all our gadgets into the sea and going to live in a cave, what can we do to protect our privacy?
“Most websites, apps and devices have privacy settings that allow you to disable personalised ads or data-sharing features,” says Gillian Bolsover, who studies online manipulation of political opinion at the Oxford Internet Institute.
“There are also search engines such as DuckDuckGo or Tor browsers that offer anonymous and encrypted searching.”
It’s also worth bearing in mind that despite the concerns surrounding invasive targeted ads, there can be a positive side, as Gemma discovered.
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“In September 2015, a few weeks after my miscarriage, an ad popped up on my Facebook page for a fertility app,” she remembers. “We’d been trying to conceive again but with no luck, so I ended up clicking on the ad, which was asking for volunteers to try out a new app to track your hormones and calculate when you were most fertile.
“I ended up taking part in the study and got pregnant in January 2016. I was also offered free weekly scans throughout the pregnancy, which was so reassuring in the lead-up to Oscar’s birth in September 2016.
“So in a way, despite the heartache most of the ads caused, one also really helped us.”
Sources: Pew Research Center Polytechnic University of Catalonia