For example, it might contain your username or your password or, in the case of some pages that we saw in this system for sale from doctor's offices, contain the name of the doctor and even medication that was being renewed. And that actually contains a lot more secrets than you might realize. That's all the letters that appear after - through the HTTP that you see. They can also look at the exact address at the top of the page. And they were in the business of watching everything you did on the Web, sending it out somewhere else and then that site was sending it on to someone else, who then made it available for sale.ĭAVIES: So when we click on the I agree box after not reading all - the long thing, what does that allow the add-on to harvest from us?įOWLER: It allows the add-on to look at every webpage you go to. These are these little apps, these little programs that you add into Chrome or into Firefox that are supposed to help you do things on the Web more easily, like keep track of your passwords or, you know, maybe get discounts on certain websites.Ī lot of them do that, but it turns out a surprisingly large number of them have a side hustle in your data. And what we discovered along the way is that there is a giant hole in people's Web browsers that we're installing ourselves, and they're called extensions. And where did this data come from?įOWLER: It came from their Web browsers. I could have opened them up and downloaded them.ĭAVIES: Right. I found people's tax documents that they were - thought they were only sharing with their tax preparer. I found people's records from their doctors prescribing them medications. GEOFFREY FOWLER: I found all kinds of things that normal people would consider secrets and that corporations spend a lot of money - millions and millions of dollars - to try to keep out of the hands of their competitors and criminals. It's For Sale." What kind of personal data did you find available for sale on the Internet? He spoke with FRESH AIR's Dave Davies.ĭAVE DAVIES, BYLINE: Well, Geoffrey Fowler, welcome to FRESH AIR. He writes his technology column from San Francisco. Geoffrey Fowler joined the Post in 2017 after 16 years with the Wall Street Journal, writing about consumer technology, Silicon Valley, national affairs and China. And he discovered that Amazon had kept four years' worth of recorded audio from his home, captured by his Alexa smart speaker, including family conversations about medications and a friend doing a business transaction. He's been investigating the ways our browsers and phone apps harvest personal information about us even while we're sleeping. Fowler writes a consumer-oriented technology column for The Washington Post.
If you ever get the creepy feeling you're being monitored when you use your computer, smartphone or smart speaker, our guest Geoffrey Fowler is here to tell you you are.
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