Private Browsing Mode: How to make sure no one knows what you do on the Internet? Is your Internet provider tracking you?

According to a HeadHunter survey, 76% of companies study candidate profiles on social networks. Mainly in order to understand what the applicant is like as a person and to find information missing in the resume. To be fair, it is worth noting that some employers remain indifferent to entertainment social networks. “We don’t watch Odnoklassniki or Facebook. It is not very easy to assess personal, let alone professional, qualities based on your profile and online behavior. For example, it is difficult to understand whether a photo of a man jumping on the edge of a cliff speaks of his courage, inability to calculate risks, or his love of alcohol. But we pay attention to profiles in professional networks, for example, on LinkedIn.ru - there we can assess experience and knowledge at the initial level of getting to know the candidate,” says Ekaterina Krylova, HR specialist at an international FMCG company. And, nevertheless, you should not neglect any of your accounts. The content of a social network page is an important part of the image, and attention to every detail is necessary.

First detail. Information danger

If an employer decides to study your page, the first thing he will pay attention to is your profile data: education, work, etc. that you considered necessary to disclose about yourself. In creative professions, hobbies may come under scrutiny. If you are subscribed to 10 culinary, 15 automotive, 25 entertainment communities and not a single professional one, this will not add any advantages to you. “We definitely look at the list of interests. Since we are a creative company, it is important for us to understand how interested a person is in music, culture, and literature,” Alexey Ametov, publisher of Look At Media, gives an example.

Second detail. Take it off immediately!

Even seemingly innocent photographs published on your page can raise questions. It would seem that what is criminal in vacation photos - you are on the beach, by the pool, in a cozy restaurant? But with an abundance of such relaxing photos, a potential employer may have the thought: “If not a single photo shows excursions or active recreation, can the candidate be considered energetic and striving for self-development?” The main photo of the user is also of great importance. “Our HR manager doesn’t study photo albums often. But, of course, he always pays attention to the userpic. If there is nudity, religious, political or nationalist symbols, this applicant will not fit into our company,” says Alexey Ametov.

Detail three. “What are we talking about?”

"What are you thinking about?" - Facebook asks and you describe in detail yesterday’s party, complain about the weather or scold the State Duma... Be careful! Overly emotional messages and detailed stories about personal experiences or intimate adventures do not brighten your image. “When looking at the applicant’s page, we look to see if there are any anomalies in the content that would indicate that the person is inadequate. Aggressive posts about politics, hundreds of reposts of cats - this is repulsive,” explains Alexey Ametov. Stories about hobbies are welcome if, in addition to work, a person has a hobby in which he also strives to achieve success: this characterizes him as a purposeful person. But there shouldn’t be too many hobbies. Here's an example from the web. On one of the women's forums, a girl asks for advice - she hasn't been able to find a job for six months. Her HR manager friend advised her to “clean up” her account. She is perplexed: after all, she writes there about yoga, and about philosophy, and about her 5-year-old daughter, and about music, and talks about psychological problems, and talks about how to develop muscles, and she has a lot of readers - what’s the problem? The answer is not long in coming: “Judging by your page, you clearly have no time for work.”

Detail four “How often?”

The frequency with which you post or change your status may also be of interest to the employer. If you post at least a dozen of your own thoughts, photos or links per day, it can hardly be said that you devote little time to online entertainment. “If I see that in one day an applicant managed to post three photographs of himself, repost several other people’s postcards and write 5 texts, I definitely have doubts about how effectively he will spend his working time,” says the HR manager of Montbrook LLC » Elena Shkodik.

Fifth detail. Social circle

The employer may also be interested in your circle of friends. Based on this factor, it is easy to understand how much the information provided in the resume corresponds to reality. “For example, if on your resume you list a large number of projects in which you took part, but in your list of friends there is no one also associated with these projects, this raises suspicion. It also looks strange if a person writes that he has high communication skills, but in fact he has only one online account, which barely has 30 friends,” says Elena Shkodik. Friends’ comments on your posts and photos also play a significant role: “Oh! After this photo, you and I drank port until the morning!” - of course, employers are people too, and they also don’t deny themselves good wine during their vacation. But it would be better not to make such comments - just in case.

How to prepare a page for an employer's visit?

Marina Khadina, head of the career department at HeadHunter, spoke about what you need to check first on your social network page.

“Most employers want to know who you are as a person, what you are interested in besides work, and who you communicate with. Yes, they already have a resume - your professional portrait, but the team consists of people, and they need to be able to get along together. In this case, interesting hobbies, a sense of humor and photogenicity will be to your advantage. A social profile can serve you well, so you shouldn’t close it completely or go into deep secrecy under an assumed name. Here's what you can do with your page if you want to create a good impression with your employer.

Minimum program:

understand the visibility settings: it is better to hide all overtly personal photos and recordings from a wider audience. Let them please close friends and not embarrass others;
Check which of your friends have tagged you in photos and posts. If some marks confuse you, it is better to remove them;
Look carefully again at everything that remains open to a wide audience: are there any discrepancies with your official resume? Inconsistencies can alert the recruiter, which is absolutely not what you want.

Maximum program:

analyze your publications and assess how well they correspond to the image you want to project at work as a professional. If they match and you are in harmony with your virtual self, then that's great. If not, think about your activity;
indicate your real name, fill out the sections with work and education, indicate your personal and professional interests, put a good photo on your profile - in general, try to make your social portrait as detailed and clear as possible for everyone who does not know you;
Regularly write something about your work: a person who is ready to share news about his profession and devotes time to this evokes respect and interest. You should not publicly speak negatively about previous employers. According to our research, this repels every second recruiter who visits your page;
The more professional contacts you have, the higher the likelihood that a representative of the employing company will contact you and appreciate your profile. A person who establishes public professional contacts always attracts more attention.

The main thing is to remember that your social page is only yours. You shouldn’t write something you don’t like to please someone. Just be yourself and follow these simple tips!”

You need to recruit candidates through social networks, if only because you will know exactly what kind of person is sitting in front of you and wants to work for you, says Victoria Sorochinskaya, Spice Recruitment expert.

Russian recruiting has always developed rapidly and energetically. If in the 90s candidates were looked for with the help of an intractable accountant or a gloomy personnel officer in one of the folders “Personal File No...”, then in the new millennium methods and tools replaced each other more quickly and radically.

Technological progress, global computerization and customization have led to the fact that the path to finding an employee has become easier, but also more thorny from an ethical point of view.

Nowadays it’s easier to find a person on the Internet than the old-fashioned way with the help of a labor exchange or a familiar HR employee. However, many candidates sincerely do not understand why their profiles on social networks or active participation in thematic forums and communities can become an obstacle to a bright future and excellent career prospects. And he is faced with the tricky question “Is it necessary to select a person for a team based on information from social networks?” – or is it better to rely on personal meetings and the candidate’s resume?

Let us return mentally to the period when I worked to facilitate the selection of managers and top management in the company. Those were glorious times! The job service published resumes of exceptionally high-level employees, it was simple and good for the recruiter, the coordinate system was established and structured. By the way, this is why HeadHunter has such a name (translated as “a person who lures away qualified personnel”). But over time, HH gained popularity and increased its audience: managers and specialists at various levels appeared here. The bar has dropped.

Highly qualified candidates refused to join the “club” and left the platform, preferring to look for work through recommendations from colleagues, friends and acquaintances.

The launch of Odnoklassniki became a turning point in recruiting. It's time for social networks. Those who recently left work services appeared on the increasingly popular Odnoklassniki, VKontakte, and Twitter. Recruiters and hunters gained access to a huge amount of information and open contact information: from where a person studied, to his religious views and attitude towards the institution of marriage.

And here's an amazing fact. Recruiters who do not yet use social networks when recruiting personnel, according to our estimates, lose up to 70% of useful contacts.

The candidates themselves did not immediately realize that publishing information about themselves in the public domain sometimes has the opposite effect. Not the one they originally expected.

Using open data from social networks, the recruiter creates a portrait of a person. At the interview, interested in professional experience, he calmly studies profiles on Facebook and Twitter. The recruiter already knows that the person sitting in front of him is fond of sports, he is a family man and loves to travel. And he understands perfectly well that a company that wants an introvert on its team will not be satisfied with this candidate.

Yes, only with the help of social networks it is impossible to create a complete picture, including work experience, professional skills and career prospects of a specialist. But Facebook, Twitter and Instagram will provide additional food for thought and help you decide on someone who will fit harmoniously into the team and will not be a ballast in the usual business processes.

When inviting a candidate to Spice, we always check social networks for unexpected surprises. So, for example, while searching for recruiters, we came across a girl who was a religious sectarian, a young man posing in a fur coat and sunglasses from different angles and settings, and a girl who was a professional video blogger. According to her, she has reached the peak of fame, but after looking at her social networks, we found that since the creation of the channel, she has uploaded 5 videos with a total reach of 20 views.

Once a nice woman (and a good professional) came for an interview, but on her personal blog on LiveJournal she posted long posts about alcoholism and constant depression.

If the recruiter who handled this vacancy had not contacted the candidate through social networks, we might now be working together. It's not a fact that it was successful.

To avoid getting a “pig in a poke”, always check the person who is working with you. And there are 3 obvious benefits to doing this.

Enormous amount of information

People publish statuses about changing jobs, moving up the career ladder, sharing achievements, certificates and advanced training diplomas. The profiles indicate gastronomic, musical and political preferences. By collecting all the information, looking at recent photos - and reading the candidate's current posts on general topics, you will begin to better understand the person who wants to carry the status of your colleague.

Wide coverage of candidates

A large coverage of potential employees greatly simplifies the work of finding a specific person who may not be available on job services. And it offers a wide selection of specialists with different skills, abilities, experience and background.

Current and up-to-date information

Society lives in a very fast paced environment, and it’s not always the person you need who updates their resume on HH or SuperJob the moment they immediately change jobs. A Facebook profile comes to the rescue, which thoughtfully offers to notify everyone about recent career changes.

Or another situation that may benefit the recruiter. You have long and hopelessly wanted to lure a candidate from someone else’s company to yours, but he is happy with everything, he doesn’t want to change anything and, in principle, he feels great. And, having read one sunny day that he was tired of everything, his superiors refused to promote him - and in general everyone around him was inadequate and did not understand the sensitive soul of a great specialist... You understand: here it is.

Now you can safely call and offer yourself as someone who will not offend, will take care of you and will encourage work zeal in every possible way.

1 /5 Tony Lam Hoang/Unsplash

Your apps, search engines, and social networks know a lot of interesting things about you that you don't even tell your closest friends. To find out exactly what details the Internet stores about your life, BBC journalist Sophia Smith Galer took a program called Data Detox and talked about her experience.

When I first read about Data Detox, I was filled with doubt. I decided that this program would force me to refuse to participate in digital society. And since my job requires a constant presence on the Internet, this would be professional suicide. However, it turned out that the goal is rather to study and streamline our life on the Internet.

Data Detox was developed by non-profit groups Mozilla and Tactical Technology Collective and was timed to coincide with the Glass Room performance in London, which offered visitors a behind-the-scenes look at what was happening to their data. Yes, the authors understand that the past cannot be returned, but they urge you to be more careful in the future.

The authors of the project say: “Our program is designed to take half an hour a day or less - and in just eight days you will learn to control your data using simple and understandable operations. We hope to change the way people think about information gathering, which now often happens without their knowledge.”

I was intrigued and decided to try it.

Day 1. First discoveries

1 /5

On the first day, they essentially scare you by showing you how much information about you is available in search engines. I am a member of the younger generation and an online journalist, so a significant part of my life is online, which I have long accepted. If you clear your search history, you can Google from a stranger's perspective and see what images and links are associated with your name. I was pleased with the results, but mainly because I posted almost all of this content on the Internet myself.

In general, everything was fine until I started experimenting with alternative search engines. DuckDuckGo is a non-profit site, meaning, unlike Google, it has no interest in analyzing your search history and providing you with personalized results (and therefore reduces your digital footprint somewhat if you use it). However, it uses other search engines to show suggestions (notably Yahoo, Bing and Yandex). Interestingly, Google tried to end my search as "Sophia Smith Galer BBC", and DuckDuckGo suggested "Sophia Smith Galer liberal".

One can guess who made such a request and why. Maybe it was my employer, maybe it was a reader of one of my articles, or maybe it was a participant in the bullying on Reddit that I somehow became a victim of - who knows? But understanding how completely strangers can influence our digital image is completely disarming.

Day 2: What Google Knows About You

1 /5

Data Detox innocently asks, “Is Google your best friend?” Look, I know I spend a lot of time online, but I also have my own life, thanks for caring.

However, it turns out that Google really is my best friend. Detox asks what I share with the search engine, and then wonders if I would tell it to my best friend. I use Chrome, Docs, Gmail, Translate, YouTube and Maps, which means - take a deep breath - I tell Google where I am, what device I'm using to access the Internet, what I'm interested in, what I'm working on, what I'm sending by email different people, which doctor and which bank I go to, which telephone operator I use, what words from other languages I don’t know, what entertainment I’m shy about, what I study, what music I like to listen to, where I went in the past and where I go now. My best friend knows a lot about me, but of course not as much as Google.

And I don’t have an Android phone yet - and if you do, then all your voice requests are also filed, so Google knows perfectly well what your voice sounds like. However, any records that Google stores about you can be deleted.

Day 3. What Facebook knows about you

1 /5

This day was quite interesting because I realized that I had completely stopped writing on Facebook. Last year, the company began to worry about the so-called “context collapse” - the point is that when my friends and I were 12 years old, we dumped absolutely everything on Facebook, and now I put photos on Instagram, and links to news or observations end up on Twitter.

As a result, many have a Facebook profile consisting of some shameful teenage manifestations. Maybe it's time to clean out this trash heap and ask your friends to remove your disgusting photos?

Day 4. Search and Internet surfing

1 /5

Every time you click “like” on Facebook and Twitter, you give information about the pages you visit and your IP address to third-party companies. And these are just the visible tracking mechanisms - there are also a lot of invisible trackers that accompany our every step. At the same time, if a company has many trackers on different sites, it will have a fairly complete picture of your wanderings on the Internet.

The default privacy settings are not very protective of our secrets, so Detox advises changing them or using a special mode in which the history of search queries is not written - in Safari this is called “Private Browsing”, and in Chrome “Incognito Mode”. You can also install one of the extensions that prevent tracking. It's also worth keeping in mind that when you visit sites that prefix the address with https rather than http, this means that your connection to that site is encrypted.

However, Detox warns: “Incognito mode prevents trackers from following you, but does not provide anonymity!”

Day 5. Connection

1 /5

Detox reminds: “Your phone broadcasts every second to any open channel: “I’m here!” I'm here!". Also, he tries to connect to everything he can.”

Our phones are constantly searching for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networks, and if you named your phone “Masha’s phone,” can you imagine how many people can find out your name? It's better to rename the phone.

Another issue is location data. It's a good idea to turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth when you don't need them and minimize the times you allow apps or sites to obtain your location. The information provided by location services for your phone is a tasty morsel because it allows you to understand where you live and work, and what kind of lifestyle you lead in general.

Imagine the possible consequences. It's also important to understand that any Wi-Fi network you connect to will see a list of networks you've connected to in the past, most of which have meaningful names. For example, your current employer could theoretically find out that you secretly went to a competitor for an interview. What could your boyfriend or girlfriend find out?

Day 6: Cleanse

1 /5

Mobile apps make a big contribution to increasing our digital footprint. If you have more than forty of them, you are at great risk, so it is better to at least delete the unnecessary ones.

However, every person has the applications they need, and for me these are social networks. But you need to remember that they also have privacy settings, and there is something to configure there. In addition, perhaps some applications can be replaced with alternative ones that will not collect your data. Detox, in particular, cites Skype as an example. There are other chat options, including Jitsi Meet and Signal - you can chat in them too, but these are non-commercial programs, free and open source.

If you also want to try Data Detox, follow the link. The creators of Detox write:

“Try to also involve family and friends in the program, because your digital footprint largely depends on them. Every time they tag or mention you, or post any information about you online, it adds detail to your image - regardless of your own behavior."

Prepared by Evgenia Sidorova

Every person on the planet can be subject to government surveillance. Read our article about how and why we are being watched and what methods they use.

Thanks to information received from intelligence officer Edward Snowden, it became known that the US National Security Agency wiretapped the heads of 35 countries.

In addition to government officials, ordinary residents are also subject to wiretapping.

For example, New York resident Michelle Catalano and her husband, who wanted to purchase a pressure cooker and a backpack via the Internet, became victims of intelligence surveillance. The seizure service that arrived at the house asked the couple to slowly leave the house, thereby greatly frightening them.

The reason for this behavior on the part of the intelligence services was the terrorist attack in Boston, which happened a few months earlier. The terrorists made bombs using pressure cookers and carried them to the site in backpacks.

And this case is not the only one that proves that any human actions can easily be tracked by special units.

All anti-terrorist methods, which, in fact, must be properly coordinated, are very chaotic. And innocent people very often fall under surveillance.

According to Edward Snowden, there are a lot of programs designed to spy on people. One of the most famous is Prism, which cooperates with such well-known computer companies as Microsoft, Google and Facebook, and cellular operators.

They listen to conversations, read correspondence, view photos, videos and Internet queries of any person who uses it. In other words, almost every inhabitant of the planet falls under surveillance.

Even after turning off your phone or computer, special programs will allow you to turn them on remotely and monitor any movements of a person, record his conversations and actions.

It is possible to escape such surveillance only by removing the battery from the phone. But, for example, such a popular phone as the iPhone does not have such a function.

The public organization EPIC has learned that the US NSA has created a list of special words for surveillance.

By searching Google for “Drug Enforcement Administration,” the DEA automatically puts the person on its list of drug traffickers and begins paying special attention to all of their online activities.

By asking the question in a chat: “Where can I buy Nurofen without a prescription?”, you can easily get on the list of potential drug addicts.

Being the most harmless person in the world, the employee who wants to identify the attacker in you will do so.

If you want, you can find fault with anything. So the question arises: what to do to avoid surveillance?

What you definitely shouldn’t do is throw your phone and computer from the sixth floor.

You need to try to monitor your behavior on the Internet: what pages you view, to whom and what you write, what files you download.

Of course, you can install special programs, encrypt personal data, surf the Internet under anonymous profiles, but perhaps this will attract the attention of the intelligence services.

Even the most professional hackers fell into the hands of intelligence services, despite their ciphers and codes.

By the way, an interesting fact. Edward Snowden once asked Russian President Vladimir Putin whether Russian intelligence services were monitoring their residents. The president's answer was negative.

All Russian services are under state control, and no one will allow them to conduct indiscriminate surveillance in the country.

Take it for yourself and tell your friends!

Using the example

To verify this, just enable the developer tools built into Chrome or Firefox. More than half of these requests have nothing to do with documents located on the “Hacker” servers. Instead, they lead to 27 different domains owned by several foreign companies. It is these requests that eat up 90% of the time when loading a site.

What are these domains? Advertising networks, several web analytics systems, social networks, a payment service, the Amazon cloud and a couple of marketing widgets. A similar set, and often even more extensive, is available on any commercial site. Not only we know about them (this goes without saying), but also the owners of these 27 domains.

Many of them don't just know. They are watching you with the most intense interest. Do you see the banner? It is loaded from the server of Doubleclick, a large advertising network that is owned by Google. If the banner were not there, it would have found another way. The same data can be retrieved using the Google Analytics tracker or through AdSense, by accessing fonts from Google Fonts or jQuery on the Google CDN. At least some clue can be found on a significant proportion of pages on the Internet.

Analyzing the history of a user’s movements on the Internet helps Google determine with good accuracy his interests, gender, age, income, marital status and even health status. This is necessary in order to select advertisements more accurately. Even a small increase in targeting accuracy at the scale of Google is worth billions of dollars, but other applications are possible. According to documents published by Edward Snowden, American and British intelligence agencies intercepted Google trackers to identify suspects.

You are being watched - this is a fact that you need to come to terms with. It's better to focus on other issues. How do they do it? Is it possible to hide from surveillance? And is it worth it?

Find and hide

In order to follow a person, you need to be able to identify him. The simplest and most well-studied identification method is a cookie. The problem is that it is most vulnerable to attacks from privacy advocates. Both users and even politicians know about them. In the European Union, for example, there is a law that forces sites to warn users about the dangers of cookies. It makes no sense, but the fact itself is alarming.

Another problem is that some browsers, by default, block cookies set by a third party - such as a web analytics service or advertising network. This limitation can be circumvented by sending the user through a chain of redirects to a third-party server and back, but this, firstly, is not very convenient, and secondly, it is unlikely to save anyone in the long term. Sooner or later a more reliable identification method will be required.

There are many more places in the browser where you can hide identification information than the developers intended. It just takes some ingenuity. For example, through the DOM property window.name, you can transfer up to two megabytes of data to other pages, and unlike cookies, which are only accessible to scripts from the same domain, data in window.name is also available from other domains. The only thing that prevents us from replacing cookies with window.name is the ephemerality of this property. It does not retain its value after the session ends.

A few years ago, it became fashionable to store identity information using so-called Local Shared Objects (LSOs), which Flash provides. Two factors played in LSO's favor. Firstly, unlike cookies, the user could not delete them using the browser. Secondly, if each browser has its own cookies, then LSO, like Flash itself, is the same for all browsers on a computer. Due to this, it is possible to identify a user who alternately works in different browsers.

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