Everyone's Trying to Track What You Do on the Web: Here's How to Stop Them

http://lifehacker.com/5887140/everyones-trying-to-track-what-you-do-on-the-web-heres-how-to-stop-them

by ColinWright • 14 years ago

58 50 14 years ago

lifehacker.com

mrspeaker• 14 years ago

Maybe it's just to reinforce the point, but Ghostery prevents 9 scripts from executing on that page!

jgw• 14 years ago

Indeed. I liked the bit where my browser did a lookup on "track.lifehacker.com".

nodata3• 14 years ago

> We'd say Ghostery, AdBlock Plus, and Priv3 are the essentials here.

With Ghostery and ABP installed, why is Priv3 also required?

greyman2• 14 years ago

Good question. I tried Priv3 today, but it seems to be the subset of Ghostery.

BTW, it is necessary to use ABP, when I have Ghostery installed? (I don't intent to block ads, unless they actively track me, like Adsense, etc.)

alexro• 14 years ago

AFAIK, Ghostery doesn't prevent the tracking scripts from running, it just checks for known bugs

slowpoke5• 14 years ago

>I don't intent to block ads

May I ask why? I can understand whitelisting domains who you regularly visit and use (and thus want to support with ad income) and whom you trust to serve safe and unobtrusive ads , but I would be going insane without ABP on the web. It's excruciating to use a browser without ABP installed. Imagine trying to hold a conversation with someone while at least half a dozen of people are screaming nonsense at you - that's how it feels to browse the web with ads to me.

FellowesQi20143• 14 years ago

Yes, it is necessary. Think of Ghostery as filling the role of a black-list and ABP filling the role of a grey-list (and sometimes white-list).

greyman2• 14 years ago

I use Ghostery and Https-Everywhere add-ons, plus startpage.com when I want to use Google search engine.

barkingtoad3• 14 years ago

I'm so tired of this.

If you're scared, get a dog.

Or just read the "Why Should You Care" section and really think about it. Is it so bad? Do they have your gramma's name and address and are they sending the Depends cops over to check if she's peed herself? No, they have a bunch of anonymous data that they never attach to you personally.

Everyone's trying to track YOU? NO, that's just some sort of weird narcissist paranoia on your behalf. Nobody is trying to track YOU. Everyone is trying to track EVERYONE. YOUR information is worthless on its own. NO marketer cares about YOU personally and YOUR data is not worth anything negotiable.

If you're scared, get a dog.

aw3c2• 14 years ago

Everyone tracking everyone IS the problem.

nodata3• 14 years ago

What could possibly go wrong with individuals being tracked to this level? Don't be naive.

barkingtoad3• 14 years ago

Explain, and while you do, remember that "slippery slope" is a logical fallacy.

luser001• 14 years ago

> Everyone is trying to track EVERYONE

I used to think this, but the Target article on NY Times changed my mind. I've started locking down all my computers.

FellowesQi20143• 14 years ago

FWIW, my Firefox privacy add-on stack is:

* Adblock Plus

* BetterPrivacy

* Ghostery

* NoScript

* PrivacyChoice TrackerBlock

* QuickJava

* User Agent Switcher

Yes, there is some overlap in functionality. And getting the configurations correct can be a minor pain (none of them are ready to go after install).

I have also found the Chromium version of Ghostery cannot be configured to block DoubleClick tracking. :-( So much for using Chrome-based browsers as my main browser.

slowpoke5• 14 years ago

Another good add-on to consider is RequestPolicy. It controls cross-site requests and thus blocks a lot of stuff before it even loads. It's a nice complement to NoScript.

If you don't like all of the social media buttons (which are also trackers and are, in my opinion, an eyesore), consider subscribing to the Antisocial filter list[2] for ABP. It blocks all of these pesky, useless annoyances and removes them from sight.

Oh, and btw: Chrome is Chromium based, not the other way round. ;)

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/requestpolicy...

[2] http://adversity.uk.to/

dharmach• 14 years ago

Is there any add-on similar to TrackMeNot which can regularly send request for random web pages and obfuscate my internet history? TrackMeNot does similar thing for search engines.

jbooth8• 14 years ago

I work in the ad industry. We take pains to make sure that everything is hashed as early in the process as possible, so we're basically just correlating hashes with each other. There's nothing personally identifiable.

I understand that it sounds creepy, but it's worth noting that advertising is what pays for all the free content you enjoy on the internet.

EDIT: Downvoted for comments from the industry. Thanks! Let me know if there's any questions I can answer for you guys.

dawgr• 14 years ago

You don't need to track people to show them ads and in no case should you track people without their consent.

jbooth8• 14 years ago

That's awfully sanctimonious. Do you cut personal checks to websites who's content you enjoy? If not, they need advertising dollars, and advertising can bring in way more money when anonymized tracking is used.

slowpoke5• 14 years ago

The thing I have with collecting data, even if depersonalized, is that it's practically taken without consent. I'm completely fine, for example, with giving detailed, but anonymous usage statistics to Mozilla, because they nicely asked me if they may do that, to improve Firefox. I'm not okay with people just "taking" those statistics from me.

Tracking should be opt-in, not opt-out. I shouldn't have to tell you to stop tracking me, you should need to get my consent to start tracking me.

>it's worth noting that advertising is what pays for all the free content you enjoy on the internet

Which is why I whitelist trustworthy domains I frequent in Adblock Plus. Again, opt-in.

Also, advertisement need not necessarily be targeted. You can run generalized ads just as well. Sure, it might not be as profitable, but if the trade-off for more profit is less privacy, then I'm afraid I'll give priority to the latter.

jbooth8• 14 years ago

I can understand your point, although I have a small beef with the consent point (you're visiting the website on your own consent, after all). More importantly though, you're basically pitting your privacy against someone else's money. Of course you're going to rank your privacy higher.

What if it was your privacy vs less content on the internet because more sites go out of business?

DLarsen• 14 years ago

Targeted advertising makes ad delivery efficient. If you somehow turned off all targeted ads today, the advertisers are getting less bang for their buck. The price they would be willing to pay sites will drop dramatically. How do you compensate for that lost revenue? More ads? "Donate with PayPal" buttons?

Although there are legitimate concerns about everyone tracking everyone, the Internet is less annoying overall as a result of the advertising efficiency of targeted advertising.

bobds2• 14 years ago

I don't think hashing by itself means much. Especially when working with tightly-constrained values.

How about k-anonymity?

jbooth8• 14 years ago

Can you explain how hashing is insufficient? You're saying someone could use a lookup table of hashcodes for all the URLs on the internet and deanonymize the URLs? The browser's identity is still unrecoverable.

EDIT: Ah, just looked up k anonymity. We don't store any of the information that they're protecting for, like age, sex, any other personal attributes.

joering2• 14 years ago

> I understand that it sounds creepy, but it's worth noting that advertising is what pays for all the free content you enjoy on the internet.

I found your statement bit cocky, but you may not see it the same way since you work "in the field".

And you are pretty much wrong. Large part of web is free. Wikipedia? Sure they ask for money and every year they come up with just enough, since people appreciate free content and asked are willing to donate. Heck, people even write free software that you can download from websites that are free of ads [Apache is the first thing came to my mind].

I am sure web would look different have Google not based its business model on advertising, etc, but I would never say that the internet fundamentals are based on paid advertise-displaying model. I don't believe Tim thought it will or should as well.

jbooth8• 14 years ago

Ok, allow me to amend my sentence:

"It's worth noting that, aside from a few laudable charitable organizations, advertising is what pays for all of the free content you enjoy on the internet".

Wikipedia and Apache are both one of a kind. 95% of the great content out there (and 100% of the shitty content) is supported by ads.

brudgers• 14 years ago

As if to demonstrate the point, the page does not load any content unless javascript is turned on [Firefox], even though the server does not require it in order to provide the article text.

One of the questions in my mind is in regards to Chrome, which I have not used for some time. Does it still send keystrokes from the address/search bar to Google servers in order to provide suggestions?

pavel_lishin4• 14 years ago

I think Blogger does the same thing; it kills Instapaper functionality. (Net result: I don't read things published on Blogger.)

Everyone's Trying to Track What You Do on the Web: Here's How to Stop Them

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