Guide | How To How to keep companies from tracking you online — for good

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Venustus

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Dec 30, 2012
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These days, it’s nearly impossible for the average consumer to expect anonymity online or off — at least not without a bit of legwork first.

Data brokers —companies that specialize in gathering information about consumers and selling it to third parties — have turned the collection and sale of publicly available personal information into a multibillion-dollar industry.

At any given moment, hundreds of these companies are analyzing everything from our ZIP code, income and ethnicity to our taste in music, our driving record and how often we search for funny cat videos. They then take that information, sort us into groups and make a fortune selling it to marketers, employers, charities, government agencies, and other businesses. As to what they do with this information, the details can be hazy. Some data are sold to marketers, but other information can be used to screen prospective employees, run background checks, detect identity theft, or come up with a dubious alternative to traditional credit scores.

There’s little we know about data tracking and the companies that do it. Neither regulators nor lawmakers have managed to wrap their heads around data brokers quite yet.

What we do know, based on reports by the Government Accountability Office, Federal Trade Commission, and the World Privacy Forum, a consumer advocacy group, is that it’s nearly impossible for consumers to control the information that’s been collected about them. The FTC will publish the results of its investigation of nine major data brokers later this year.

“A lot of this [tracking] is happening in a benign way, but to me the security problem is what makes the privacy problem so much worse,” Avi Ruben, a professor of computer science at John Hopkins University’s Information Security Institute, told Yahoo Finance. “If every company collecting this data was capable of securing it 100%, then we could take some comfort. But they can’t.”

We talked with a few experts to find out steps consumers can take on their own to keep their information and browsing habits as private as possible.


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Martin Cook

New Member
Jun 24, 2014
2
great! thanks for posting this.
I do think that the internet has become the greatest intelligence institution that we all should be aware of.
facebook is planting cookies in our browsers to collect information about us, some sites we assigned to now knows our credit card number, government are tracking online information about us, our name can be sullied forever only because of one short article someone decides to write about us.
 

kmr1684

Level 3
Verified
Jun 23, 2014
148
when we start using the service depends on internet everything exposed about ourself is 100% true, when installing any free application or service then we never take time to read TOS or EULA or T&C, :rolleyes: we don't have enough time and patience to read and understand they will collect each and every information about us when we are using their services or application. Do we,:( So we exposed more than what we had to share with public. :D
 

Littlebits

Retired Staff
May 3, 2011
3,893
Unfortunately blocking trackers can have some bad points:
1. If order to access your preferences to some websites you have to allow cookies to log on. You can log off each session then log back on again but that is a hassle.
2. Blocking trackers on some websites causes the pages not to load correctly where the pages are useless.
3. Many websites are started blocking access using VPN's and proxies because they are abused.
4. Some websites to not honor "Do Not Track” feature.
5. Even if you take all of the privacy precautions, you still can be tracked by those who want your info.

Enjoy!! :D
 
  • Like
Reactions: kmr1684

kmr1684

Level 3
Verified
Jun 23, 2014
148
Unfortunately blocking trackers can have some bad points:
1. If order to access your preferences to some websites you have to allow cookies to log on. You can log off each session then log back on again but that is a hassle.
2. Blocking trackers on some websites causes the pages not to load correctly where the pages are useless.
3. Many websites are started blocking access using VPN's and proxies because they are abused.
4. Some websites to not honor "Do Not Track” feature.
5. Even if you take all of the privacy precautions, you still can be tracked by those who want your info.

Enjoy!! :D
5. Even if you take all of the privacy precautions, you still can be tracked by those who want your info.
100% truth, nobody can say better than this, i liked it. :)
 

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