Marco De Cesaris

This article was originally published in May 2008.

There are 1,319,872,109 internet users in the world [1], and most of them are not perfectly aware of “the surveillance society”, of its laws and regulations. When protection against terrorism and personal safety are involved, people accept the notion of a surveillance society, however when the focus shifts onto personal privacy and anonymity, this perspective tends to change. This essay explores some of the aspects of surveillance society in relation to the internet, first of all highlighting who watches who, how the surveillance happens, positive and negative points of view and finally, how to deal with the surveillance society.

(image courtesy of mvwphoto) “The surveillance society is a society which is organised and structured using surveillance-based techniques. To be under surveillance means having information about one’s movements and activities recorded by technologies, on behalf of the organisations and governments that structure our society. This information is then sorted, sifted and categorised, and used as a basis for decisions which affect our life chances. Such decisions concern our entitlement and access to benefits, work, products and services and criminal justice; our health and well-being and our movement through public and private spaces.” [2].

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Hi everybody,

thanks for reading this post.

Here is an example of basic tracking.

I used javascript and some php.

If you click on the link below (please be aware that is just a rough page!!! don’t expect a web designer work for this ) you will be redirected on a page where the basic of tracking is shown.

Actually you will be given information about the browser that you are using (even though this info is not 100% accurate – but one of the javascript object.property is quite accurate: navigator.userAgent), then you will be given your IP address (which most of the times helps in understanding your location or nearby you – e.g. this would be extremely helpful for geo-targeting, even though other data could be used), and again couple of “unique” IDs will be set up on the fly for you. One of these IDs is built in javascript (gathering info from your machine) and the other one is coded in php (using the information on the server).

At a first impact these 2 IDs would seem useless (because these IDs continuosly change each time that anyone refresh or access that page), but actually if these IDs are linked and triggered with a rare event on the website, they can be extremely useful for additional purposes.

On the top of it, a detection about your cookies is also done (just checking if your cookies are on or not).

PS Make sure javascript in your browser is enabled, otherwise you will get a message suggesting you to enable javascript in your browser (don’t worry, no data collection is done in this case).

http://www.marcodecesaris.com/javascript-doc.html

In one of the future posts, I will also set up cookies (which is fundamental for any kinds of proper tracking). For now (if you want to have a look at how cookies are set up and work), please feel free to check it here: this is a basic example of using javascript and if you complete the quiz and then access this page again, you will understand how the cookie works. Feel free to have a look atthe code as it is fully commented.