Want to see who’s tracking you online in this world of hyper-connectivity among devices and routers? But before you get into this subject you need to understand the concept of data collection via tracking and how it’s used by the companies who track your digital activity.
Data can include personally identifiable information, such as your email address and social security number. It can also be your internet activity, including the pages you visit and even metadata like when you visit those pages.
Also includes your email conversations, online purchases, medical information. And even financial details like credit card numbers are all considered data, too. And trackers collect anonymous browsing logs from users and sell that “data” to marketers, which use it to develop hyper-targeted online ads.
Your internet activity can also be tracked by cookies. Which are small bits of text that are downloaded and stored by your web browser. Cookies were initially developed to improve your internet experience. These are used by most websites and services to log a user’s online habits.
But how to See who’s tracking you online?
It’s very hard to escape data collection and surveillance. If you use Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or Twitter, be aware most of these online services track you and only recently began adopting end-to-end encryption.
And Browsers are at the heart of data collection. Ad networks track you across sites, while internet providers log the pages you visit. While hackers try to use insecure Wi-Fi connections and unencrypted websites to successfully gain access to you and harvest data.
There are several browser extensions available that claim to help you see who is tracking your web-surfacing habits.
HTTPS Everywhere: Visiting a HTTP website that doesn’t support encryption by default? This plugin forces it to use encryption, which helps protect your online purchases, payment details, and general web surfing from malicious actors who are eavesdropping for theft purposes.
– Privacy Badger: This extension, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), works on Opera, Firefox, and Chrome. It monitors third parties and ad networks that try to track you through cookies. Along with digital fingerprinting and can even auto-block them.
– Disconnect: Disconnect, an extension available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera, is designed to visually show you which websites are tracking your activity in real-time. Invisible trackers that monitor you can also be easily blocked with Disconnect.