Do you get the sneaky suspicion that you are being watched? You’re not alone! Every action you take on the web is tracked in some way or another. Advertisers are some of the worst offenders of tracking your online activities.
The reality is that there is not much you can do today to limit what is tracked. There is little legislation around online tracking, so it is still a bit of the “wild west.”
But things are changing! Mozilla’s Firefox browser has an option to tell web sites that you do not want to be tracked (go into Options, then the Security tab). Unfortunately, the default setting for this option is to allow web sites to track you, and not too many people know to change this setting. Microsoft recently announced that Internet Explorer 10 will have tracking disabled by default when it is released. This will be a major benefit for personal privacy and help push back some of the tracking services.
Today, I recommend that people use Firefox as their primary browser and enable the option to tell web sites that you do not want to be tracked. There is also a cool add-on that has been recently developed for Firefox that shows you who is tracking your online movements. The results are blood chilling.
Watch the video below for more information about this subject and the Firefox add-on.
We are not even 2 bites into breakfast and there are already nearly 25 sites that are tracking me. I have navigated to a total of 4.
Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
Excellent post! I just installed collusion for firefox. What do you think about the privacy impact from moving from ipv4 to ipv6?
I am not fully up to speed yet on all things IPv6, so I consulted the “Book of Knowledge” (AKA Wikipedia). There are some privacy provisions built into IPv6 that help keep an IP address from being tracked, but there is nothing in IPv6 itself to stop tracking cookies, which is the primary method of tracking online activity.