Episode 9: Digital Avatars and avoiding being a sucker

Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, stated in a video address that Instagram does not listen to you through your phone microphone. But we’ve all received a super targeted advert after chatting about something, right?

The long and short, as admitted by Adam, is that they don’t need your conversations. They already know everything they need to know about you. All the data gleaned from your online activity and social media accounts is enough. Do I believe him? No. But he’s got a point, listening or not, they already know everything they need to know about you.

Check out: theyseeyourphotos.com to understand how much information can be gleaned from a single photo posted online. Combine this with your words, your searches, tracking data from websites you visit alongside the basics (e.g. your age and location) and yeah, you’re cooked.

Not 100% but pretty revealing. And that is only one photo.

They use this data to make a ‘digital avatar’ of you. Like a stuffed puppet, a digital caricature of who you are.  More importantly: what you will buy and when.

Yeah, no thanks.

So it’s probably not possible to eliminate this nefarious little gold-digger. But we can take active steps to limit their ability to: a) collect data on us and build this ‘digital avatar’ and b) limit their opportunities to show us adverts for stuff that we don’t want, we don’t need and will not fulfil us. The latter is a lot easier than the former.

The below isn’t an extensive list of steps taken to eliminate this problem. The ultimate solution is to not have any accounts and use the internet like a spy would.  But that is perhaps a bit impractical for most of my readers. To create an Analog Life in this area, our goal should be to make using the internet more of a tool that serves us, rather than something that uses us to access our wallets.

The below is some steps I have taken to basically prevent myself to being shown adverts.

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Part 1: The basics

1) Downloading an ad-blocker extension to chrome/firefox/safari. Sometimes I’m blown away when I meet a fellow Gen-Z who just rawdogs the internet – are we from the same planet? These vary in quality. I used to use AdBlock Plus. But now I use Ghostery. Ghostery also makes effort to shut-down trackers.

2) Changing your search engine. I’ve toyed with a lot of them. Google feeds the ad machine. Ecosia plants trees (and is as useful as a pet cat for retrieving things). I’ve settled on DuckDuckGo. I’ve noticed it has gotten a lot better in the past couple years. I’d also like to note hear, it’s easy to get used to how Google returns results and see everything different as ‘wrong’. This is of-course perception, for DuckDuckGo is just as good for finding things once you learn it’s differences.

3) Change your ‘new tab’ home page. Mine used to have adverts and ‘articles’ (basically more ads). Changed it in settings. Good stuff. Basically the more steps you can take to make your browsing experience ‘analog’/ direct/ bricked, the better.

4) Refusing all cookies of course. No idea what effect this has, can’t lie.

5) Basically anything posted by someone who has more than 10k followers is going to be a #ad whether they declare or it. Exemptions exist, like scientists, activists and politicians even, but tread carefully.

6) Apps vary in quality, but most stuff on TikTok is basically an ad. IG reels is often prey to this. Just be cautious.

7) Obviously being mindful of what you post and where. Now you probably don’t want to stop posting. So I’d say just be cognisant of the relationship between your posting, your data and how it is used.

Part 2: de-Googling (and trying to de-Meta)

The second part of this is that I have started the slow but painful process of de-Googling. I’m doing this more out of principle, but I’m wondering if its having a knock-on effect on reducing my ad exposure. I’ve noticed that not being signed into YouTube bamboozles its algorithm. Before it had me ‘pegged’, and would show me reviews of outdoor clothing and equipment (in other words, an advert).

Now he’s lost. Good. The videos were boring anyway.

I’ve moved my photos and drive to Proton. I’ve moved my email to Proton. I’ve moved my planning sheets to CryptPad (totally sucks, Proton Sheets about to drop soon though). All my notes are on my Proton Drive (written and managed via Obsidian). I have tried to move as much of my communications to Signal over WhatsApp (different company, same beast). I’m not sure how much of an effect this will have on their ability to advertise to me, but I have taken an eye of suspicion to mostly anything put out for ‘free’ by big tech companies. I’ve started paying for tools that I use (such as Proton Unlimited). This was a difficult mental barrier to get over, but staying true to the theme of many items discussed in My Analog Life.

 If something is for free, you are the product.

And I don’t want to be a product anymore.