More Digital Traces…

Via @wilm, I notice that it’s time again for someone (this time at the Wall Street Journal) to have written about the scariness that is your Google personal web history (the sort of thing you probably have to opt out of if you sign up for a new Google account, if other recent opt-in by defaults are to go by…)

It may not sound like much, but if you do have a Google account, and your web history collection is not disabled, you may find your emotional response to seeing months of years of your web/search history archived in one place surprising… Your Google web history.

Not mentioned in the WSJ article was some of the games that the Chrome browser gets up. @tim_hunt tipped me off to a nice (if technically detailed, in places) review by Ilya Grigorik of some the design features of the Chrome browser, and some of the tools built in to it: High Performance Networking in Chrome. I’ve got various pre-fetching tools switched off in my version of Chrome (tools that allow Chrome to pre-emptively look up web addresses and even download pages pre-emptively*) so those tools didn’t work for me… but looking at chrome://predictors/ was interesting to see what keystrokes I type are good predictors of web pages I visit…

* By the by, I started to wonder whether webstats get messed up to any significant effect by Chrome pre-emptively prefetching pages that folk never actually look at…?

In further relation to the tracking of traffic we generate from our browsing habits, as we access more and more web/internet services through satellite TV boxes, smart TVs, and catchup TV boxes such as Roku or NowTV, have you ever wondered about how that activity is tracked? LG Smart TVs logging USB filenames and viewing info to LG servers describes not only how LG TVs appear to log the things you do view, but also the personal media you might view, and in principle can phone that information home (because the home for your data is a database run by whatever service you happen to be using – your data is midata is their data).

there is an option in the system settings called “Collection of watching info:” which is set ON by default. This setting requires the user to scroll down to see it and, unlike most other settings, contains no “balloon help” to describe what it does.
…
At this point, I decided to do some traffic analysis to see what was being sent. It turns out that viewing information appears to be being sent regardless of whether this option is set to On or Off.
…
you can clearly see that a unique device ID is transmitted, along with the Channel name … and a unique device ID.
…
This information appears to be sent back unencrypted and in the clear to LG every time you change channel, even if you have gone to the trouble of changing the setting above to switch collection of viewing information off.

It was at this point, I made an even more disturbing find within the packet data dumps. I noticed filenames were being posted to LG’s servers and that these filenames were ones stored on my external USB hard drive.

Hmmm… maybe it’s time I switched out my BT homehub for a proper hardware firewalled router with a good set of logging tools…?

PS FWIW, I can’t really get my head round how evil on the one hand, or damp squib on the other, the whole midata thing is turning out to be in the short term, and what sorts of involvement – and data – the partners have with the project. I did notice that a midata innovation lab report has just become available, though to you and me it’ll cost 1500 squidlly diddlies so I haven’t read it: The midata Innovation Opportunity. Note to self: has anyone got any good stories to say about TSB supporting innovation in micro-businesses…?

PPS And finally, something else from the Ilya Grigorik article:

The HTTP Archive project tracks how the web is built, and it can help us answer this question. Instead of crawling the web for the content, it periodically crawls the most popular sites to record and aggregate analytics on the number of used resources, content types, headers, and other metadata for each individual destination. The stats, as of January 2013, may surprise you. An average page, amongst the top 300,000 destinations on the web is:

– 1280 KB in size
– composed of 88 resources
– connects to 15+ distinct hosts

Let that sink in. Over 1 MB in size on average, composed of 88 resources such as images, JavaScript, and CSS, and delivered from 15 different own and third-party hosts. Further, each of these numbers has been steadily increasing over the past few years, and there are no signs of stopping. We are increasingly building larger and more ambitious web applications.

Is it any wonder that pages take so long to load on a mobile phone off the 3G netwrok, and that you can soon eat up your monthly bandwidth allowance!