Hey, You, Get Out Of My Head

Ok, now I’m really pissed off. We all have our little digital pilotfish attached to our online personae but some are much more annoying and potentially dangerous than others.

This computer, despite all my former-anti-nuke activist paranoia about this sort of thing, has been invaded by a shitty little bit of spyware masquerading as adware called Specificlick, apparently via Sitemeter, which is gone, as soon as Martin and I find an alternative hitcounter. (Or maybe not. Are hitcounts actually that important? Discuss.)

It first made itself apparent by brazenly declaring itself in the address bar of my browser, prepended to the address of the site I was visiting, like this:

http://dg.specificclick.net/?u=http%3A//blogname.blogspot.com/&r= .

Cheeky fuckers.

Having updated my spyware and AV and run both no no avail, I figured I really should do a little reading, first on how to remove it, then (because of that whole paranoid former anti-nuke activist thing) I want to know who the bloody hell are these people that have invaded my privacy?

Specificlick is a cookie developed by Specific Media Inc. We’re used to cookies, ho, hum, but this is of a specialised kind. It allows advertisers from one site or ad network to follow you around the web wherever you go subsequently, provided they are subscribers to Specific Media Inc.’s services, bombarding you with their own ads all the while. Imagine a nutter following you down the street and round the corner and on to the bus, yelling “Oi, you, MUPPET!” in your ear.

But while it does this, because of Specific Media’s recent acquisition of Sitemeter’s traffic monitoring capability specificlick also accumulates data on sites visited, referrals, outclicks, length of page view and so on: all the data that Sitemeter compiles, but specific to you, the browser. Or me, in this particular instance.

What exactly is it they want to know, what will they do with it and why? Who benefits from that? That there is material benefit is undoubted – why bother, otherwise? Data is useful and saleable stuff. That’s why, because their little bit of code is installed on my pc via Sitemeter, from their comfortable homes in sunny Yorba Linda, California or their sleek offices in Irvine, the Vanderhook brothers or their employees can see exactly what I’ve been reading and thinking abouit. In effect they have a spy in my head.

Oh I’m sure they don’t think of it that way, it’s all business to them:

The Vanderhooks created Advertisement Banners.com from their parents’ Yorba Linda home.

It was one of the few companies to use “pop-under” technology that allows advertisers to place their product pitches underneath computer Web sites so that a person sees the ads after they close their browser rather than being confronted by the more annoying “pop-up” announcements while they’re looking at something else. .

Oh, those bastards. I remember them. It turns out the Vanderhook brothers, all still in their twenties, were ripped off by one of their popup ad customers so they sued and won $4.3 million, thus enabling for the nice little data-mining empire they run today.

In fact they’re doing so well they’ve attracted a major infusion of venture capital cash. Who from, I wondered? The investors are Shepherd Ventures, a fund working with the US Small Business Administration who have significant other investments in military tech r&d companies, and Southern California’s largest venture capital firm, Enterprise Partners, whose other investments are mainly in biotech. Why this sudden interest in data mining technology, I wonder?

Much as the tinfoil-hatted devil on my shoulder (and lord knows it has had provocation) is urging me to discern the outline of some grand military-industrial plot in all this, if there is one it’s so subfusc as to be invisible. So that’s not the road I’m going down here.

No, its the principle of the thing that bugs the fuck out of me – the fact that because of the US’ lack of any form of homegrown data protection legislation and its unique position as the largest purveyor of media in the English-speaking world, American data mining companies with dodgy motivations have free rein to spy on mine and other non-USAnians thinking, despite theoretically sufficient legal protections at home here in Europe.

It may be a purely commercial process now but how likely will entrepreneurs like the ambitious young Vanderhooks be to turn them down, should Homeland Security or the NSA come knocking with wads of investment cash or a Presidential Order? They may be clever coders, they may have worked hard, for all I know they’re Nice Guys – but what they’ve also done is developed the perfect tool for detecting thoughtcrime.

Where could it lead? Am I being alarmist? Recently there’ve been reports about commercial businesses turning down people for mortgages, car loans, apartments, even for buying a treadmill, because private businesses were accessing a list of ‘terrorists’ supplied by Homeland Security:

Businesses checking customers’ names against a Treasury Department terrorist watch list are sometimes denying services to innocent people, according to a report released Tuesday by civil rights lawyers.

The 250-page list, posted publicly on a Treasury Department Web site, is being used by credit bureaus, health insurers and car dealerships, as well as employers and landlords, according to the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area.

The list includes some of the world’s most common names, such as Gonzalez, Lopez, Ali, Hussein, Abdul, Lucas and Gibson, and companies are often unsure how to root out mismatches. Some turn consumers away rather than risk penalties of up to $10 million and 30 years in prison for doing business with someone on the list, the group said.

“We have found that an increasing number of everyday consumers are being flagged as potential terrorists by private businesses merely because they have a name that’s similar to someone on this government watch list,” said the report’s author, Shirin Sinnar, an attorney with the Asian Law Caucus.

Many companies who encounter even a partial match are unsure how to root out mistakes, and prefer to turn away someone trying to get a loan or rent an apartment rather than risk penalties of up to $10 million and 30 years in prison, the lawyers said.

How long before commercial data mining companies, with their increasingly sophisticated strategies for finding out what we’re thinking, doing and planning from our online presence, are compelled to do something similar under pain of penalty?

Big questions from one small irritating bit of code, but the answers are crucial to the future of the relationship between the governors and the governed.