wotstowaway

Getting started with Qt is pretty easy I'd say, at least when you use Python and not C++:

   import sys
   from PyQt4 import QtGui

   def window():
      app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)
      w = QtGui.QWidget()
      b = QtGui.QLabel(w)
      b.setText("Hello World!")
      w.setGeometry(100,100,200,50)
      b.move(50,20)
      w.setWindowTitle(“PyQt”)
      w.show()
      sys.exit(app.exec_())
       
   if __name__ == '__main__':
      window()

In general I think Qt is one of the best-documented UI toolkits out there, and while it surely is complex it offers a lot of modern features and is able to produce pretty great UIs.

But most people don't know what happens to their data, and many don't even know that they're being tracked when the opt in to provide "anonymized usage statistics".

Of course it's a completely different if the government forces total surveillance, but the impact on people's privacy can be just as bad or even worse.

Concerning historical domain data, there are several vendors (e.g. Domaintools) that provide this kind of information, and domain registrar information usually contains the registration date for the domain, so proving it was a different site is possible.

You're absolutely right though that it's highly problematic if we use automated tools to analyze this kind of data, as many people can end up in the wrong category due to either flawed analysis methods or faulty data.

Again I'd say that currently the greater threat comes from private companies that will use this data to build "shady" rating systems which will affect the daily lives of many people, without giving these people a chance to verify or oppose the data being used against them.

In fact, it's already possibly (and easy) to obtain the un-anonymized browsing history of millions of people. I was part of a (journalistic) team that got their hands on a free sample from a company that offers "website traffic analytics", and which uses browser extensions as well as mobile apps as their main surveillance tools.

The data set contained the complete browsing history of almost 3 million German Internet users, and except for a few popular sites (like Facebook), no URL cleaning/anonymization was performed at all.

So here we have a single provider that is able to capture the browser traffic of 5 % of the population already, and is ready to disseminate this data to anyone who can pay the price (even giving out months of data for free). As there are dozens more companies that collect data using a variety of ways, it wouldn't be surprising to me if you could stitch these individual data sets together to get the traffic of > 50 % of all Internet users, without having any central point of data collection.

So although the government is a real threat to citizens privacy, unregulated private actors are much more dangerous in my opinion.