Track and Feel

     Tracking has never been as universal as it is today, from the postal service ("track your package"} to those hidden pixel tags.  Wait, those what?  Here's how one site put it: A pixel tag is literally a microscopic image—often just one single dot on your screen—that you cannot see with the naked eye.  They are embedded in web pages and, most annoyingly, in emails.  When you open an email containing a hidden pixel, it secretly sends a message back to the sender. It tells them exactly what time you opened the email, what kind of device you used, and whether you clicked anything.  When my wife and I broke down and bought a new television, we checked beforehand if it had a camera built in, as most newer models do (ours didn't...phew; but it did have ACR or content tracking which tracks what you view and needs to manually be turned off).  But there are even more trackers being uncovered beyond those tiny pixels, and yes, the advanced trackers are now being aided by AI (and here you thought AI would be your friend).  Funnel analysis, session recording, heat generation, code snippets, and those are just a few tools that consumers can use for their products, never mind what commercial users license, wrote UserPilot.  Imagine what the monster data centers such as Amazon use, although bear in mind that Google makes 80% of its revenue from advertising (and sad to say, Amazon may be even worse when it comes charging advertisers to pay for "pushing" their listings to the top of its search results).  As to those AI trackers?  Heck, I don't even understand pixel tags...

     It's a lot of captured data, of course.  Wrote Noah Giansiracusa in his book, Robin Hood Math: There’s an entire industry, projected to be worth half a trillion dollars by 2030, dedicated to collecting and selling the trails of data your car emits when it hits the road.  Everything is tracked.  Your location and speed.  Your acceleration and braking patterns.  The music you listen to along the way.  Who you call from your car and for how long you speak.  Many cars today produce around twenty-five gigabytes of data per hour.  That's roughly the size of all English-language Wikipedia articles -- every hour.  While this data is used for safety features and navigation assistance programs, it also fuels a range of businesses, from car manufacturers to insurance companies to tech firms, that want to know as much as they can about their customers so they can squeeze every ounce of profit out of them...The old adage in marketing to know your customers has unsettlingly been taken to new heights in today's digital economy where everything you do is tracked, packaged as data, and sold to the highest bidder...Kroger, the largest grocery chain in the US, has over thirty-five petabytes of customer data.  That's over 50 percent more data than the entire digital collection of the US Library or Congress.  It uses this data to optimize its inventory and marketing campaigns -- but it also sells some of this data to other companies in a lucrative data market.  In the UK, Tesco and Sainsbury's sell customer data for an estimated £300 million a year.  To put it bluntly, these stores don't just sell milk and eggs and other food products, they sell whatever private details they can collect from you. 

    Full disclosure: One of the Kroger stores is only a few blocks away from me, and while it's not my favorite store it is --to quote so many of my neighbors who feel the same way-- so damn convenient (at least in location).  And to be honest, I really don't mind those digital store coupons that "bait" me each week with a free something such as a carton of almond milk, something which was likely tracked from my buying habits.  And I also recognize that this blog is provided and hosted by Google, which it does for free, perhaps hoping that someay I'll succumb to their offer of some sort of payback if I allow advertising on it (which I don't).  All those annoying ads before a You Tube or other social media video?  Yup, each one has trackers (which is why some "influencers" try and gather as many "views" or "likes" as they can so they can get that advertising money and live in gigantic mansions).  So I get it.  Browsers and marketers need to make money somehow to provide such services for free, even if little old me tends to ignore most of those new products and buy the same old stuff over and over (Amazon has found that nearly 90% of users never check beyond the first page when using their site, so they charge vendors to have their cheaper, and sometimes poorer quality products, shoved to the front; Google does the same).  It's capitalism at work, even if it is we peasants in the field who are keeping those princely chums happy.  So the question for those mega-browsers becomes, why bother?  What could such firms possibly want from an old dude like me?  Hmm, did I mention that those laptops colleges provide are also full of trackers (such as how long it sat idle or what pages you accessed)?  Workers in offices using company computers are subject to the same, and now often use apps that continually move their mouse roller around, according to author Noah Giansiracusa  (how long a mouse sits idle shows lower productivity). That car data of your driving habits is often sold to both insurance and medical companies (if grocery stores can make hundreds of millions from selling their data, imagine what car companies charge their willing clients).

This is NOT my home...as if.

     For me, this wondering about tracking began with Zillow, that controversial real estate app that offers "Zestimates" of your home's value as well as showing you homes in areas that you may be considering moving to -- what's for sale or rent, etc.  Zillow, which now has 80% of the listing market, is just one of many such apps such as Trulia or Redfin, to similar apps overseas such as Right Move or On the Market.  But I had decided to take a peek at such an app because, as mentioned in the previous post, my wife and I were thinking that the many stairs in our home would probably prove a hindrance down the road, my wonky knee being a preview of things to come.  So no biggee since I figured that I would look at a few listings of homes and then be done, or so I thought.  The notices from Zillow, a lot of them, became daily.  Realtors pay big bucks for such apps since their listing could reach a lot of "eyes," even if such viewings are as easy to ignore as driving by a "home for sale" sign.  But because of our planned upcoming road trip, I happened to glance at a town in Oregon just to get an idea of whether it might be a place we mght consider.  Nothing serious by any means, and once I was done I wiped out all of that viewing history: the cache, cookies, registry keys, short cuts, and more.  Cleaned everything out, or so I thought.  Now backing up, a quick primer...I tend to use Duck Duck Go as a browser which is a bit slower but it blocks all tracking cookies before your page is loaded.  Advertisers don't care for this and will often feature a message that says something along the lines of "it appears you have an ad-blocker installed" and will not load until you "enable" such trackers (which only makes me move to another page).  And even with such an ad-blocking browser, I use 3 different cleaning programs before exiting my phone or computer, one from Norton (here's a quick review from CyberLab), one from Glary Utilities, and another independent program, which you think would get "everything."  But it doesn't.  In the case of Norton, even after a cleaning, it will ask if you want to close Google and Microsoft Edge to "clean" them, even though I had never used them (they operate in the background).  As for Zillow, my searching was over so I unsubscribed, successfully, it told me.  But come the next day, and the next, and the next, there appeared a Zillow ad with the message, "we found a home in Oregon you might like."  Hmm, somehow Zillow, even after unsubscribing three times, had still avoided all of the obvious tracking stuff and found a way to keep track of where I was looking.  But it did get me thinking about how and why these sites wanted my browsing history because I was basically a nobody to them, not even a potential customer. 

      There's a joke making the rounds of Trump's favorite fairy tale being "Goldy Lots," even erecting (oops, perhaps a bad use of that word) a gold statue of himself at his Doral golf course.  And in today's world Trump is not alone in wanting gold.  The metal is consider a "safe" haven during turbulent times, although as I mentioned earlier --and as a coin shop owner told me-- if times get that bad then the only safe metal would be lead (as in bullets).  Knock, knock, give me your gold.  But an interesting story appeared in the NY Times about our "genuine" American gold...little of it apparently comes from the US.  Wait, but the US Mint says pure American gold, doesn't it?  According to the article, gold can be as controversial as so-called blood diamonds, mined and shipped illegally and from controversial sources such as rebel- or cartel-"owned" areas.  Said part of the article: Every year, the United States Mint sells more than $1 billion of investment-grade gold coins.  Each is stamped with an icon like the bald eagle, signifying the government’s guarantee, required by law, that the gold is 100 percent American...But a New York Times investigation has found that the government’s program of gold sales is based on a lie.  The Mint is actually the last link in a chain that launders foreign gold, much of it illegally mined, for an insatiable market.  The Mint buys gold that originates in a Colombian drug cartel mine.  It makes Lady Liberty coins out of gold from Mexican and Peruvian pawn shops and from a Congolese mine that is part-owned by the Chinese government, records show.  Some Mint gold has come from a company in Honduras that dug up an Indigenous graveyard for the ore underneath.  Congress in 1985 prohibited the Mint from making bullion out of foreign gold because it wanted to insulate the process from human rights abuses, primarily in apartheid South Africa...Gold mining funds Sudan’s brutal civil war and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  Surging gold prices have helped Venezuela and Iran temper the effects of financial sanctions.  Colombia’s biggest cartel, the Clan del Golfo, traffics in gold alongside cocaine — and uses the proceeds to maintain control through murder and bombings.  Illegal miners deforest and pollute the Amazon, poisoning people there with mercury.  Terrorist groups, including some linked to Al Qaeda, are getting into the gold business, too.  Yes, the article notes that Trump's new gold coin will likely contain little of that "100% American" gold.  All that glitters,* after all, is not gold, since Wikipedia defines bullion as being a: ...non-ferrous metal that has been refined to a high standard of elemental purity.  Hmm, if purity is the defining factor then Trump would seem to be less bullion and more bully...

     All that said, even I get tired of the negativity and bashing and bullying coming from politics.  So it was refreshing to read the courageous work of Lizzie Velasquez, born with a rare genetic disorder that made her appearance seem a bit apart from "normal," in her words.   And although she lived with being avoided by others, or made fun of in grade school, it was when she was 12 that she happened to see a thumbnail picture of her on an 8-second video.  It couldn't be her, she thought, until she clicked on it and saw the title, "world's ugliest woman."  The comments were all negative: She should put a gun to her head and kill herself; Do everyone a favor and kill yourself; Why didn't her parents abort her?; Kill it with fire! -- and thousands more.  It had been viewed over 4 million times.  As she wrote: I know a thing or two about being bullied...the truth is, certain aspects of our culture aren't so wonderful.  As a society, generally speaking, we suffer from greed, entitlement, and an expectation of instant gratification.  It's the fast-food culture.  We want what we want, when we want it, and we don't want to have to wait -- and we've gotten to the point where we can almost have that...Technological advances have brought us to a point in time when we can indulge our every whim, and that has created a certain level of selfishness in us as a culture.  And not the right kind of selfish, either!  This is a toxic version of selfishness, a version that can make us forget we aren't the most important person in any given room,  It's all too easy to lose touch with the fact that other people and their feelings and needs are just as important as our own...What makes me different from most people is immediately visible, and my looks can seem shocking to some.  I know some people still see me as the ugliest woman in the world, just like whoever posted that short little video of me on YouTube so long ago.  But that just doesn't matter to me anymore, not nearly as much as it matters that I keep pushing to broaden people's perceptions of what's "normal."  My work is about increasing our culture's acceptance f the fact that everybody is different.  We are all different, and that's a good thing!  And people need to be exposed to these differences.  She titled her book, Dare to Be Kind -- How Extraordinary Compassion Can transform Our World.

Photo of a home in Tehran in April: Dung Hoang/NY Times

     Sometimes, in all this world of worry and divide and yes, ugliness, we can find that compassion in the simplest places, and often that place is home.  In a piece in Orion, author Katherine Wilkinson wrote: Home, the dictionary warrants, is about where we reside.  The word’s typical use suggests something fairly fixed, even permanent -- a place we remain, or, if we leave, to which we return.  Homecoming is ritual.  Animals home, returning by instinct to their territory.  To be at home is to be at ease, at peace...But when flux comes to neighborhoods, ecosystems, and entire countries -- how can we not lose our bearings? The scale of loss is different, but the sensation we know well.  In the thick of the climate crisis and its abutting troubles, the places we call home today may become unrecognizable or be lost completely...To be home, I’m coming to see, is to say yes—yes to the needs quaking across our planet, yes to this time of trouble and transformation, yes to the persevering possibilities of life—even if I say yes with tears in my eyes or a howl in my chest.  To be home is to honor that there is so much beyond our choosing, and yet we also have choice.  All is hallowed ground.

     Continued Velasquez in her book: When things go wrong in our lives. what matters is how we deal with it.  The pain that comes from changes and endings is all about loss.  The loss of a relationship, of a pet, of a beloved family member, loss of a job, money, or a comfortable, familiar identity.  Transitions like these are difficult because they represent a loss, so we must have methods in place to process the loss and move forward from it.  That requires seeing not only what has been lost, but also what has been gained...That's why I urge you to start simple.  Start with kindness, and start with yourself.  Dare to be as good to yourself as you would to someone you truly loved -- because that's how you should feel about yourself...Then, when you're ready, dare to turn your kindness outward into the world...If each and every one of us commits to taking these steps, little by little, we will change the world into a place where there is no fear of difference, and no fear of cruelty or harassment.  In flooding this world with love, we will be taking active steps toward creatng a better future for our children and a better culture for everyone -- a culture of kindness.

    Small steps, Velasquez seemed to be saying.  But to also realize how a multitude of tiny barbs and stings takes courage and determination in yourself to overcome.  Duke Ellington said: The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician.  Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the backyard on a hot night, or something someone said long ago.  And whether it is one of thousands of anonymous social media viewers telling a 12-year old gurl that she's ugly and that she should kill herself, or a US President calling a female reporter "piggy," one only has to step back to see who is the stronger person, and who is the coward.  Lizzie became a celebrity after her TedX talk below.  Watching it, what you won't see is someone ugly or deformed.  Instead you'll see a person as individual as you or me, and a woman courageously working to change our perceptions, and to fill our world with something it so desperately needs now...kindness.

     Velasquez ended her book with this: My life was put into my hands just like your lives are put into yours.  You are the person in the front seat of your car.  You are the one who decides whether your car goes down a bad path or a good path.  You are the one that decides what defines you...I worked my butt off.  I used the people who were telling me that I couldn’t do this – to motivate me.  I used their negativity to light my fire to keep going.  Use that.  Use that negativity that you have in your life to make yourself better, because I guarantee you, you will win.

                         

      

*Glitter is not something any of us really think about but a piece in Popular Mechanics on how forensics used glitter to catch a killer brought out some interesting facts, especially how glitter manufacturers keep their production methods quite secret (and that glitter --from makeup to party favors-- is almost impossible to fully remove).  A few highlights from the piece: glitter is never made in round dots (it needs corners and pointed edges to "stick"); glitter is usually made of a composite of three materials bonded together; one of the largest users of glitter is the maritime paint industry (what??).  And while you're still reading, I have to venture off of glitter and mention something you may have also already heard about: the planned data center about to hit the desert area north of my state's Great Salt Lake (although the lake is in quite a bit of trouble these days).  The project is named Stratos and will be almost twice the size of Manhattan, use double the amount of electricity that our

Portion of drying Salt Lake.  Photo: Stewardship Utah

entire state uses in a year, and require the equivalent annual water usage of 20,000 homes from the drought-stricken area.  It's being promoted by Shark Tank billionaire Kevin O'Leary who pushed to have it designated under a state-formed "military" listing of national security importance so that it could avoid any environmental review or liability, and avoid most taxes and future cleanup costs.(he said that all the protesters at the council meeting were probably paid outsiders...sound familiar?).  The project --despite a reported 98% of residents allegedly being against it, according to Stewardship Utah-- was unanimously pre-approved (campaign funding "mysteriously" appeared in a few council member's PACs a few days later).  Did I mention that our state was listed in 2026 as the 2nd most corrupt, by the World Population Review?