Building Web Apps that Respect a User's Privacy and Security

Chapter 2. Respecting User Privacy

This has happened to all of us: one evening we’re shopping for something mundane like new bed sheets by reading reviews and browsing a few online retailers, and the next time we open one of our favorite websites up pops an ad for bed linens. What’s going on here? Even for those of us who spend our days (and nights) developing for the web, this can be confounding. How does the site have access to our shopping habits? And just how much does it know about us?

This feeling of helplessness is not uncommon. According to the Pew Research Center, 91% of American adults “agree or strongly agree that consumers have lost control of how personal information is collected and used by companies.” Many users may be comfortable giving away information in exchange for products and services, but more often than not they don’t have a clear understanding of the depth and breadth of that information. Meanwhile, advertising networks and social media sites have bits of code that are spread across the web, tracking users between sites.

As web developers, how can we work to maintain the privacy of our users? In this chapter, we’ll look at how web tracking works and ways in which we can hand greater privacy control back to our users.

How Users Are Tracked

As users browse the web, they are being tracked; and as web developers, we are often enabling and supporting that surveillance. This isn’t a case of tinfoil hat paranoia: we’re introducing the code of ad networks to ...