Photo: Rutmer Visser (Shutterstock)
Every website that you visit tracks you in some form or the other. Usually, it’s in form of in-site cookies—those little blocks of data used to remember your preferences. But things start to go a bit haywire when sites use ad-trackers, third-party cookies, and now, fingerprinting.
Third-party cookies are cookies inserted by other companies like Google, Facebook, or advertising companies. These are used to follow you around from one site to another, building a profile that can be used to serve ads. These cookies even follow your device’s location.
Fingerprinting is a relatively new threat to online privacy, allowing companies to know your browsing fingerprint data. This can consist of your browser version, type, operating system, time-zone, location, plug-ins, fonts, and a lot more. There’s so much data here that the cumulated data can be used to identify a single user.
So what can you do about it? If you want to go nuclear, you can build your own tracking blocker using Raspberry Pi. Or you can install privacy extensions like Decentraleyes, uBlock Origin, or DuckDuckGo. But first, you should start with a browser that already has good privacy features built-in (so no Google Chrome, we’re afraid).
