Some of you may be old enough to have sat in front of a TV and watched the 1984 MTV video by Rockwell (now on YouTube) — yes, we had to sit in front of a TV to watch music videos. As a reminder, the first smartphone came out in 1992, the iPhone was launched in 2007, and Smart TVs became the dominant form of television by the late 2010s. Here are a couple of interesting facts concerning Rockwell and his chart-topping song Somebody’s Watching Me. First, Rockwell’s actual name is Kennedy William Gordy and he is the son of the famous Motown founder and CEO Berry Gordy and Margaret Norton. In order to avoid the appearance of nepotism, Rockwell approached Motown (without his father’s knowledge) and secured a record contract on his own merits. Second, the song had childhood-friend Michael Jackson singing the chorus lyrics and brother-in-law Jermaine Jackson singing back-up. If you would like more details, Rolling Stone published this 2016 article.
If you still haven’t gone on YouTube and watched the video, I suggest you take a 4-minute break and see if you can recognize Michael Jackson’s voice in the chorus. In 2021, I feel the song’s lyrics are more relevant than they were in 1984. As Rockwell sings: “Can I have my privacy?” Maybe. But it will take a lot of effort on your part.
Towards the end of 2020, on one of those days “I was working from home”, I decided to audit my digital footprint and see if I too was being “watched”. My investigation started by finding the latest research on online tracking. My search led me to the Princeton Web Transparency & Accountability Project (WebTAP) where I found a 2016 working paper which was presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2016. In short, the research found that Google’s trackers were installed on 75% of the top million internet websites! That was five years ago and I’m guessing Google hasn’t “backed down”.
With the above information in hand, I decided to check my online activity at Google (I stopped using Facebook in 2016 so Mark Zuckerberg lost interest in me). After clearing the three online-activity sections (Web & App Activity, Location History, and YouTube History), I felt the shackles come off and I was finally “untrackable”. However, I was still receiving junk emails in my gmail account and my online searches seemed to “read my mind”. What did I miss? Again, I went back to my online activity and found these small, three dots next to “Search your activity” and clicked “Other Google Activity”. To my surprise, there appeared forty-one extra options which I systematically checked and deleted their saved activities. But that wasn’t enough for me. I still felt annoyed that someone was watching me. So for 2021 I decided to change my online habits and begin my journey to restore my online privacy.
My foremost change was to switch my web browser from Google Chrome to Mozilla Firefox and use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. But this switch to an open-source browser with private searches came with a fortuitous twist! DuckDuckGo does more than enable private searching and seamless protection from trackers. They are also pioneers in online privacy and provide resources to educate us “Rockwells” of the 21st Century. A case in point is an article titled What Does Google Know About Me which was the motivation for this blog and a highly recommended read.
Well folks, that’s all for now. Over the next few months I plan to share more of the changes I made through my journey to online freedom. I sincerely hope you will remain interested so that you too can start to restore your online privacy. As DuckDuckGo stated in their spread privacy blog from 21. Mar 2017:
Deleting your Google search history will prevent it from being used by the highest bidder on the millions of sites and apps that use Google’s advertising networks.
DuckDuckGo Blog article “Is Your Data Being Sold”