10 Tips: How To Avoid Internet Tracking
Nowadays, there is not a secret that by big corporations use Internet tracking to monitor our online behavior to provide us with more optimized and personalized experience. Each one of us has had the feeling that some ads follow us everywhere we go online. It doesn’t matter whether we visit a webpage, or we are just checking our social media feed, or even watching our favorite stream.
“Congratulations!” We all are being tracked.
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Definition: Internet tracking also known as web tracking, browser tracking, digital tracking or data tracking is an analysis of online users’ behavior, mostly for the purpose of delivering a more personalized browsing experience. |
What is Internet tracking?
Internet tracking might sound scary at first, but actually this is a virtual standard practice for Internet-connected devices and browsers, for websites watching how we engage with their content to improve our user experience, for advertisers to target us with more relevant products and services. According to some studies, 79 percent of websites globally are tracking your data. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that our data is at risk.
However, we all need to know what data, how and why it is being collected, right? That’s what we are exploring here and what AdBlocker Ultimate fights for.
Why do websites track us?
As we mentioned before, websites claim that the more they know about us, the more they understand us – ideally, they use all that intel to provide us with better user experience.
- To create revenue streams – Collecting user data and selling it advertising companies to target you with more relevant products become a great additional revenue stream for many companies
- To measure business performance – Businesses reference their analytics, in particular how customers engage with their website, to optimize their content strategy and product releases
- To monitor a website’s usability – Knowing how your visitors engage with different sections of your website helps developing a more user-friendly and intuitive user experience.
- To help law enforcement agencies – Some government agencies monitor online behaviors in order to spy on suspicious individuals.
Top 10 Prevalent Trackers On The Internet
- Google Analytics: 45.3% of web traffic
- Google Static: 36.7% of web traffic
- Google Tag Manager: 35.7% of web traffic
- Google Fonts: 27.5% of web traffic
- Google: 26.5% of web traffic
- Facebook: 24.9% of web traffic
- DoubleClick: 22.2% of web traffic
- Google APIs: 15.4% of web traffic
- Google AdServices: 10% of web traffic
- YouTube: 9.7% of web traffic
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Google has some sort of tracker on 82 percents of web traffic. |
How are we tracked?
Cookies
Cookies aka HTTP cookies or tracking cookies are small pieces of information that websites collect store on your computer. This is the most commonly used data tracking method today. In fact, over 40% of websites some time of cookie.
Web beacons
Web beacons are also known as tracking beacons or web bugs track your engagement with a certain website (i.e. the content you click). Usually they are used in email exchanging to determine whether a message has been received or opened.
IP addresses
By definition, the IP address is an unique string of characters that identifies each Internet-connected devices and it is required to visit a website. On the other hand, this website might remember your IP address and use it for tracking your activity.
Favicons
Favicons are basically a shortcut icon, a website icon, a URL icon or a bookmark icon associated with a particular website or web page. They are also considered as supercookies since they operate similar to cookies, but are way more difficult to remove or decline.
Session replay scripts
Session replay scripts are programs that record a website visitor’s activity on a website, including their mouse movement, clicks, and scrolls.
The latest and greatest of Internet tracking methods is called Federated Learning of Cohorts, FLoC for shorts. This is a new-age web tracking whereby online users are not individually identified and tracked. Rather, they are categorized into a cohort of like-minded online users that is collectively tracked.
How to cover your digital tracks?
- Use an ad blocker
- Use anti-tracking software
- Use browser’s incognito mode
- Enable “Do Not Track”
- Use a private search engine
- Hide your search queries
- Don’t allow cookie tracking on websites
- Look for HTTPS
- Opt out of data broker sites
- Install AdBlocker Ultimate for Windows and activate Ghost Mode