Tracking Attraction

    Here's a quick task for you: if you're using the Google Chrome browser to read this you can peek at the top right corner and see three vertical dots.  Click on those and on the "menu" that appears, click on settings.  On the new "menu" that appears click on privacy and security then scroll down to the second bar and click on cookies and other settings.  Stay with me...scroll more than halfway down that "menu" and click on see all cookies and site data.  Prepare to be shocked (you can easily trash all or a majority of those).  What the heck is all that?  And yes, those tracking cookies will continue to appear or remain on your browser (it's a similar process on Apple, Windows, or your cell phones).  What's more shocking is that even after clearing all of that, if you run any of the cleaning programs available (I tend to use the free version of Glary Utilities), you'll be surprised at how many cookies and collected data still remain even after you've already "cleaned" your cookie file.  So why do I bring this up?  No, not because of the usual privacy debates and such, but rather because both Google and Apple recently announced that they would end the use third party "cookies"...Facebook (which makes most of its money from such cookies, and is owned by Google) was the first advertiser to put up a large protest.

    Quartz which did a quick explanation of the history of tracking and what the changes may or may not mean, said: A cookie is a small text file saved locally on a user’s computer at the behest of a website they’ve visited.  It helps the website remember information about them—often for benign reasons, like remembering their login information or making sure the items in their shopping cart will still be there even if they close the page and come back later...When cookies come from someplace other than the website a user chose to visit, they’re called third-party cookies. They’re not a particularly effective way for digital advertisers to track potential customers, and the public fears the privacy implications of having their every move online surreptitiously tracked.  In response to public pressure, lawmakers are passing legislation to protect internet users’ privacy, but the most effective move of all might be a voluntary one by web browsers that have said they will no longer support third-party cookies.  Few will mourn the functional death of the third-party cookie, but there’s reason to be suspicious of what might rise in its place.

    Blah, blah, blah (it got even more complicated in a piece in the London Review of Books* which explained what "cookies, pixels and fingerprints" all were and why they're all there on your computer and your phones).  I bring all of this up because Google and its sidekick Blogger (which you're reading) announced that Feedburner was going away.  Wait, what the heck is Feedburner?  It turns out that the independent site is an email subscription service that allows readers to "subscribe" to this blog and who knows what else.  So let's back up a little.  For one thing, I had no idea (and still don't) that I even had readers who subscribed to this blog (Feedburner says that I have 422) since Google only gives me a number for the people who have opened a particular post, willingly or by accident (lots of bear hunters in the world, as evidenced when my daily stats suddenly skyrocket to 300+ one day, then drop off to 6 the next).  For another, I have no idea what Feedburner means by a "subscriber" when it asks me to save my subscriber list since there are no names or addresses, at least none that I can figure out or access (or would want even want to).  And finally, I had no idea that this Feedburner was even operating in the background (call me naïve but it's the truth).  Jumble all of this together and you'll also discover that once you wipe out those cookies as initially directed above, there'll be far fewer in the future as both Google and Apple have now implemented their restriction of third-party cookies (well mostly, said Vox).**

    But hey, as long as we're talking about tracking and thus keeping track, let's dive into some numbers and more than a few misconceptions (that being said, I need to mention that I was never very good at guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar, even though I love seemingly meaningless stats).  How about starting off with some thing we all know...disposable face masks.  If you figure that we all had to (or were supposed to) wear them at some point, and wear them only once (at least until washable cloth ones arrived) well, what the heck happens when we toss them?  Big clue: they're NOT recyclable.  Said National Geographic, it amounts to 3 billion per minute.  Wait, per minute??  A separate study reports that 3.4 billion face masks or face shields are discarded every day.  Asia is projected to throw away 1.8 billion face masks daily, the highest quantity of any continent globally.  China, with the world’s largest population (1.4 billion) discards nearly 702 million face masks daily.  And that's not counting the gloves we throw out, or jeans: More than 11 million tons of textiles went to U.S. landfills in 2018—nearly 8 percent of all waste.

Voyager 2 looking back   Photo: NASA/ESA/G. Bacon/STScI

    Leaving this planet, let's consider the Voyager satellites, both now well past the "limits" of our solar system (it took them nearly 50 years to do so).  Who knew the sun had its own protective shield, or was zooming around our orbital circle at unbelievable speed?  Here's what National Geographic had to say: Our star is a raging nuclear furnace hurtling through the galaxy at about 450,000 miles an hour as it orbits the galactic center.  The sun is also rent through with twisted, braided magnetic fields and, as a result, its surface constantly throws off a breeze of electrically charged particles called the solar wind.  This gust rushes out in all directions, carrying the sun’s magnetic field with it.  Eventually, the solar wind smashes into the interstellar medium, the debris from ancient stellar explosions that lurks in the spaces between stars.  Like oil and water, the solar wind and the interstellar medium don’t perfectly mix, so the solar wind forms a bubble within the interstellar medium called the heliosphere.  Based on Voyager data, this bubble extends about 11 billion miles from the sun at its leading edge, surrounding the sun, all eight planets, and much of the outer objects orbiting our star.  Good thing, too: The protective heliosphere shields everything inside it, including our fragile DNA, from most of the galaxy’s highest-energy radiation.  

     Returning closer to home, I seem bombarded by changes to history, or at least how history was taught in my day. Take the term Anglo-Saxon.  Apparently this was a recent (and erroneous) depiction of a fabled European population concocted to help explain an even more fabled time period, the Middle Ages.  Now in dispute by researchers, that time period was actually worldwide spanning all seven continents and was not at all a "dark" point but rather an enlightening one.  And Europe at the time was populated with a majority of people being far from "Anglo" and white, said the radio show IA.  

    This is similar to my childhood learning of the Wild West and "cowboys and Indians," a tale also populated with a rather slanted view; said a review in The New York Review of Books: Growing up, as I did, as an Ojibwe on the Leech Lake Reservation in north-central Minnesota, we viewed the Lakota to our west as a tribe of legend...White America had its fantasies and stereotypes of the Lakota and we had our own, which were equally disconnected from reality.  But central to both of our conceptions of the Lakota was the idea that they were defined in opposition to American state power.  The Lakota, after all, had handed the republic its most stunning defeats, including the battles that resulted in the Treaty of Fort Laramie and the eradication of Custer’s command at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876...Blinded by Eurocentrism and myths about “savages,” the US military had recently paid a steep price for being dismissive of the Lakota Empire that controlled the heart of the heartland.  The Lakota had been interacting with foreigners—both Native and European—in their lands for centuries, and with Americans for nearly a hundred years (the review implied that basically the U.S. was split down the middle at the time, the Lakota pretty much controlling the entire western half of the country).  

    And here's a final thought of something more recent; according to a report in Bloomberg a few days ago (regarding the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines):  China has already shipped out about 240 million doses, more than all other nations combined, and has committed to providing another 500 million, according to Airfinity, the London-based analytics firm.  Putting even these few observations together, one has to wonder how history will be taught in the future concerning the pandemic and which countries did or didn't respond when it came to helping distribute vaccines.  Did I mention Facebook?

    We, as a species, seem to have a need to keep track of things, of expenses and votes, of history and explorations, of friends and family...even what attracts us, and why.  Said a piece in Discover about art and why some people love the abstract and some love the more "normal": ...a personality trait called "openness" is the best predictor of whether individuals are interested in art.  On the flip side, those who identify as “conscientious" are often less drawn to the arts.  These traits are part of the Big Five, a widely accepted personality theory based on nearly a century of research.  The model asserts that each personality is comprised of a combination of five core traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (known by the acronym OCEAN).  Rather than lumping a person into binary categories like introvert or extrovert, the Big Five Model asserts that each trait is a spectrum, and everyone lies somewhere between the two extremes.  A British study surveyed over 90,000 people in 2005 on their artistic preferences.  Participants completed an online questionnaire and rated 24 different paintings before filling out a personality inventory that related back to the Big Five Model.  Participants who preferred representational art like impressionism were significantly more agreeable and conscientious and less open to new experiences. Those who were more open rated the abstract works higher.  Other studies have found that people who have neurotic tendencies --anxious, shy, moody-- find abstract and pop art more appealing.  Really?  

    In the end does any of this matter?  We may be a number in a gigantic data pool, a fingerprint or face recognized by an elaborate system so that we can be discovered or "captured;" but really, can we?  That is can we ever be fully explored, even by ourselves?  In time we may prove little more than shells, abandoned as surely as an Italian ghost town or a satellite probe.  NASA reports that even with the Voyagers leaving our system, the next contact with a star will be in 40,000 years for Voyager 1 and 300,000 years for Voyager 2.  We are taught and we learn, perhaps not accurately, and perhaps not traits which we want to take with us (violence, selfishness, racism, control), along with traits we want to consider embedded (compassion, generosity, empathy, love).

    Stare at a bunch of numbers and eventually they become just that, numbers.  But we're more than that, or hope to be.  The editor of AFAR may have summed up this feeling of returning to who we are: I've missed wandering until my calves hurt.  Getting lost and then found again.  Making a serendipitous discovery on a small, empty street in a big, bustling city.  Tasting a dish that has deep ties to traditions that aren't my own.  I've missed meeting strangers whose love of home and pride of place upend any preconceptions I might have had before visiting.  I've missed figuring out the idiosyncrasies of transit systems.  I've even missed hearing, "We've reached our cruising altitude."  To Feedburner and those of you who are/were subscribers,  I will miss you.  But to you and all other readers, you are and will remain much more than numbers or data points.  You will remain welcomed strangers, family and friends.  You will remain human...   

*Said part of the piece in LRB on cookies: For​ years, I impatiently clicked ‘Accept Cookies’ without, I confess, really knowing what a cookie was.  It turns out that it’s a short sequence of letters and numbers that a website generates and deposits in your browser.  From then on, whenever you make a new request of the site, or visit the site again at some later date, the browser sends the cookie back to the site.  That’s how the cookie identifies you –or your browser, at least– to the website. (Cookies do have expiration dates, but they may be years in the future.)  Then there are ‘pixels’.  The type of pixel used as a tool to gather data is a tiny, transparent image, which you can’t see on your screen...What does the invisible pixel do?  It turns out that in itself it does nothing.  What matters is that your browser requests the pixel, which it is prompted to do by computer code that a webpage downloads to your browser when it accesses the page.  As a programmer explained to me, ‘the code runs in the browser to gather as much information as it can and encodes that into the address of the image it requests.’  Whatever you look at on the site; whatever you buy; the things you add to a shopping cart but don’t buy; information about your browser: all this and more can be transmitted via this process.  The most widely used pixel seems to be Facebook’s, which the advertising technology firm QueryClick reckons is present on 30 per cent of the world’s thousand most visited websites...Fingerprinting a phone or laptop means scanning it for characteristics that will help to identify it at a later point or in a different context.  What model do you have?  Which language setting are you using?  Which browser, and which version of it?  How does your browser render fonts on your screen?  Even the level of battery charge on your phone or laptop can help an automated fingerprinting system keep track of it, at least over the short term...Digital advertising may be only a part of surveillance capitalism, but it remains crucial because it is still the way Big Tech makes much of its money.  Google’s parent company, Alphabet, runs other businesses, but advertising currently accounts for about 80 per cent of its revenue.  For Facebook, that figure is more than 98 per cent.  Okay, not scary enough for you (Alexa, Siri, Bartholomew?).  The piece added this: ...every iPhone or iPad has an IDFA, an Identifier for Advertisers, which identifies the device.  If you are an advertiser, big or small, knowing a device’s IDFA is pretty useful: it eliminates, for one thing, any need for clunky and perhaps legally questionable fingerprinting.  Previously, a user who wanted to block access to their device’s IDFA had to know that it had one (I didn’t), find the relevant setting and make the change.  From now on, however, Apple is going to require every app –on pain of banishment from its App Store (a penalty that even Facebook is not prepared to pay)– to get each user’s explicit permission to access the IDFA or to track them in other ways.  It’s not going to be like accepting cookies.  The interface Apple is using makes it just as quick to deny permission as to give it, and Apple (which treats the App Store as its estate, and sets the rules) won’t allow apps to restrict the services they provide to those who say no.  The assumption in the industry is that only a small minority of users will agree to be tracked (as of a few days ago, this has proved to be true with recent stats showing only 4% of users "opting in" to be tracked by Facebook and others, said Flurry, a part of Verizon).  And speaking of Apple, best to hurry and install their recent update...yes, a hack has occurred.

**The Virginia Quarterly featured Stephen King's version (yes, that Stephen King) of cookies...you may find it equally disturbing, but delicious.