No website is safe, not even brandeis.edu. 

That idea was the focus of Walt Mossberg’s ’69 lecture on “ad tech”—technology that allows companies to track a user’s data. The Oct. 22 lecture before about 80 Brandeis students described how companies track things like which websites users visit, which ads they click on and how long they spend looking at the ads they see. 

Mossberg argued that ad tech has caused three major problems: the theft of user privacy, the concentration of corporate power and a rise in misinformation and disinformation. Mossberg claims that collecting user data, commonly done without user knowledge, permission or consent, is a form of theft. 

He explained that the concentration of corporate power has lead to five tech companies controlling what the general public thinks of as technology, though he did not name these five. His lecture focused on a rise in misinformation and disinformation, placing emphasis on the spread of misinformation, which he joked was better known as “fake news.” 

Mossberg is part of the News Literacy Project—a project that “a national education nonprofit offer[s] nonpartisan, independent programs that teach[es] students how to know what to believe in the digital age,” according to the Project’s website—and he underscored the importance of valid and valuable information. 

So how should users deal with this problem of tracking? The first piece of advice Mossberg offered was an app and website called duckduckgo. Duckduckgo is a private browser search engine that prevents ads from tracking users. He then showed the audience another feature of Duckduckgo, which reveals how many ads were originally on the visited website. He displayed screenshots of different websites he visited along with their ad count.

The New York Times had 43 different trackers. The first of them were from Google and Amazon, but then it split into stranger companies that no one in the audience had ever heard of before. The Boston Globe had 82 trackers, including Facebook, Google, Amazon and several more unknown companies. 

Most surprisingly, even brandeis.edu was not safe. Duckduckgo found four trackers on the Brandeis homepage. Mossberg showed that both Google advertising and Google analytics were amongst the trackers. 

Mossberg then explained the three different types of tracking. The first type he mentioned was cookies, “a string of text that is coded into a website and can follow users around the web.” He described cookies as outdated at this point, despite being the most well known type of data collecting. 

The second type of tracking discussed was web pixels. He said that a pixel is just one plot on an electronic screen, but that this plot can also follow users around the web due to its coding. He added that this is how Facebook and Google track their users. 

Lastly, Mossberg described maids. Maids are unique identifiers of smartphones, that every single smartphone has a different identifier, he said. He mentioned that phone providers downplay this feature, claiming that it can be used if the phone ever goes missing. 

Before wrapping up, Mossberg proposed his own solutions to the ad tech crisis, such as a strong federal privacy law. He pointed out that the United States has no federal protection of user privacy on the Internet, despite having many other privacy protections for other issues. 

His next solution was to bundle subscriptions together into a deal that works for most people. He acknowledged that many newspapers get their funding primarily through advertising, not through subscriptions from readers, but that if readers could create a plan that works for them, subscription sales might increase. This could involve something like having the option for micropayments, paying for an individual article rather than a whole subscription. 

He also suggested that any collected data from a website should only be necessary data (like which articles in an online newspaper earn the most views), and that no third party should be allowed to access it. 

Privacy laws in the European Union and in the state of California are examples of governmental policies designed to protect Internet users, said Mossberg. He argued that his ideal law would force every tracking service to be opt in, and to regularly check back in on users to make sure that the tracking company still had the users’ consent. 

Mossberg is a retired journalist, who worked for the Wall Street Journal for about 40 years before he retired in 2017, and now serves on the board of the News Literacy Project.