Just the other day, I was reading an article on immigration policies of Germany due to the recent events in Syria when a strange and alarming ad popped up on the right-hand side. It suddenly appeared out of nowhere trying to sell me Rooster Teeth t-shirts. Rooster Teeth is a YouTube gaming channel that sells its own merchandise, which was very unrelated to the subject of the article. What surprised me was that I had been watching a few of their videos before I looked up this article, and it alarmed me that the RoosterTeeth internet tabs were gone by then. Another example of this was when I was searching Ebay for a new GameCube controller the day before I saw three different ads for it on my Facebook feed. I'm sure this has happened to you before and seems to be common knowledge. However, even with AdBlock enabled there is no way around this marketing strategy.
The way these companies and websites do this is by using cookies. Not the ones your grandma makes, but the one's websites download onto every single device you use. An Internet cookie, or a web cookie, is a small bit of information that is stored onto your web browser. The most common use of cookies today is when you want your username or password saved on to a certain login. You start to type in your username for your bank or Facebook account, and the rest of it pops up right below. A nifty way of being lazy on the Internet but this is not the only thing that is stored. Every article or video you've seen to everything you have purchased is stored via cookies. This is how some of your websites can recommend stuff that you were previously showing an interest in. Airline websites use this method to jack up the price of that certain ticket you were looking at the day before. It's how you get emails from Ticket Liquidator offering cheap tickets to the Saint Pablo Tour you were just searching. For the average entrepreneur and customer, this seems like a great idea; right until someone reaches their hands into your cookie jar.
Session hijacking, also known as cookie hijacking, is the exploitation of a computer session to gain unauthorized access to information or services in a computer system. Whether it's through unsecured WiFi hot-spots or suspicious links in emails, hackers can access your web browser's history and cookie storage. All of a sudden, your saved usernames/passwords are copied onto the hacker's device and you are none the wiser. Can you delete your cookies? Yes, but how often can you do it is the real issue. Besides the fact that many people don't delete their cookies, it would only take a few minutes for someone to have copied your cookies. I can't say that I understand the process in detail, but this Vice interview with Edward Snowden does a god job in sending chills down your spine. Not only does it go in depth about how they do it, but also what they can get out of your device.
In this video, they talk mostly about one's IP address which is the numerical number assigned to each device you own which can be tracked with certain software. With tech companies developing this sort of software for sale, the reason why this should be alarming to you is not that these companies can shove anything down your throat or that a hacker may steal your bank or social security information. The most alarming thing about this is that this software is sold at international weapons expos and that some governments use it today. The whole reason Edward Snowden is a major figure right now is because he showed the world that the NSA has this technology in the US. Anything you type, anything you watch, anything you buy can all be found via cookies and tracked IP address. Imagine if the oppressive regimes of the Arab Spring had this kind of technology. So many of these countries used Facebook to let the rest of the world know what was going on when their country's press was silenced. This is may be a sensationalist piece, but it it is one that is worth starting a conversation about.
