Thanks to a vote by Congress that sided with the telecommunications industry, your privacy on the internet will likely end up, quite literally, for sale. You may never know which third party is buying your data, which sucks, but a mapping tool that just relaunched can give you an idea about who might be snooping on you on the cheap.
Based on a database filled with more than 180,000 “traceroutes,” IXmaps displays the path your data takes when making its way through the interwebs and shows if it passes through locations where organizations like NSA, Google or Verizon are suspected to have installed listening ports.
The site’s founder, University of Toronto professor Andrew Clement, told Motherboard that the idea of the site is to “make visible the secret, dangerous, often illegal forms of surveillance that are increasingly becoming part of everyday life.”
Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do about the NSA knowing you binge-watched YouTube clips of dogs driving cars at 3 a.m., but, to paraphrase Biggie, if you don’t know, now you know.
Just one more reason to tape up your webcam.
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