It is almost as if advertisers can read your mind! You were comparing prices on refrigerators, and now every site you visit shows advertisements for the very refrigerator you were looking at. How do they know? They know because you were tracked. Advertisers and media companies use tools including cookies and device tracking to record your preferences, browsing history and more. There are even ways to tie together data from multiple devices used by the same person.
It is almost as if advertisers can read your mind! You were comparing prices on refrigerators, and now every site you visit shows advertisements for the very refrigerator you were looking at. How do they know? They know because you were tracked. Advertisers and media companies use tools including cookies and device tracking to record your preferences, browsing history and more. There are even ways to tie together data from multiple devices used by the same person.
Many users are familiar with cookies. Cookies are bits of data passed from websites you visit to your computer. They were designed to remember information about your visits to the site, such as your login information, pages visited, products viewed, items in the shopping cart and more. Cookie syncing enables trackers to link together and share the information they have collected about you, without your knowledge or consent.
According to Arvind Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Princeton, “What this technology is really good at doing is following you from site to site, tracking your actions, and compiling them into a database, usually not by real name, but by a pseudonymous numerical identifier.” Even though we are told that the data collected is “anonymous” and not connected to our names, Narayanan says that, “It’s possible to de-anonymize these databases in a variety of ways. We’ve seen accidental leakages of personal information. What one needs to keep in mind, is that if you have this anonymized dossier, it only takes one rogue employee, one time, somewhere, to associate real identities with these databases for all of those putative benefits of privacy anonymity to be lost.“
If all of this makes you nervous, there are tools that can help you to stop your online activity from being tracked. Privacy Badger is a free browser add-on from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go on the web. According to the EFF, “If an advertiser seems to be tracking you across multiple websites without your permission, Privacy Badger automatically blocks that advertiser from loading any more content in your browser. To the advertiser, it’s like you suddenly disappeared.”
