I'm Being Followed: How Google—and 104 Other Companies—Are Tracking Me on the Web

"Oh, I'm being followed by a moonshadow, moonshadow, moonshadow"...

 

Creepy indeed. Worth reading though!

 

Thanks for posting this Ron. Great read!

 

So has anyone tried Collusion?

The author has made a not-so subtle point here: "All that I had "opted out" of was receiving targeted ads, not data collection. There is no way, through the companies' own self-regulatory apparatus, to stop being tracked online. None. "

I wonder if "banning" tracking online would not violate the tracker's fundamental rights. It's like telling someone to close their eyes while I walk past.

 

Even more reason to use VPN's and move around among their servers. You can leave the tunnel when doing personal banking, personal emails - both https in my case. You don't have to of course. That is just my policy or way I prefer.

For forum interactions, surfing, google lookups, etc... its always a VPN tunnel for me.

I value privacy and its so easy to use tunnels.

 

Thanks for the post and link, Ron. It's good to see these issues brought to the front in longer form from solid journalists and in magazines with reputations like The Atlantic. Thanks again.

 

Yes, he is, and the article is certainly good. However, everybody on this forum should know through many threads here that countermeasures are relatively easy to implement:

1. Forbid 3rd party cookies.
2. Make session cookies your default.
3. Forbid flash cookies.
4. Use Adblock Plus (particularly with the EasyPrivacy and/or Fanboy's Tracker List subscriptions) and Noscript or, on Chrome, ScriptNo.

Seriously, trackers don't worry me at all.

 

How to do 1, 2 and 3 easily at Firefox?

 

Re. #3, you may like to read https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=284280

 

For 1 and 2 see here: choose "Use custom settings for history" , deselect "Accept third-party cookies" and select "keep until I close Firefox".

For 3 use the addon BetterPrivacy (see also here) or choose the appropriate settings in the flash privacy settings panel.

 

Thanks. Let's try Better Privacy again.
It blocked my browsing in the past if I'm not wrong...