How you are tracked online and what you can do about it #YouTube
What’s the harm? Your browsing habits can give up all sorts of information about you that you may have wanted to keep private, such as who you interact with, what are you interests, when and where you travel, and what you buy.
Online companies can build a profile of you that is more accurate than what they could get from talking to your friends and family. And even if you don’t use social media and the internet, companies will build a profile about you based on your real life friends’ social media accounts.
My favorite story – Target and the pregnant daughter
How you are tracked:
- Your internet provider
- Anything between you and the site you are accessing
- Cookies on your machine
- Searching
- Browser Fingerprinting
Protecting yourself:
- Add-ons such as Privacy Badger
- Ad blocking such as uBlock Origin
- Privacy focused browsers: Safari (macOS only, default), Firefox, Brave
- Privacy focused search engine – DuckDuckGo
- A VPN
SSL and secure sites don’t protect you, and neither does using a private browsing mode such as Chrome’s Incognito.
