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Tracking the Web Trackers

Posted by timothy on from the let's-track-ann-from-account-services dept.

itwbennett writes "Do you know what data the 1300+ tracking companies have on you? Privacy blogger Dan Tynan didn't until he had had enough of being stalked by grandpa-friendly Jitterbug phone ads. Tracking company BlueKai and its partners had compiled 471 separate pieces of data on him. Some surprisingly accurate, some not (hence the Jitterbug ad). But what's worse is that opting out of tracking is surprisingly hard. On the Network Advertising Initiative Opt Out Page you can ask the 98 member companies listed there to stop tracking you and on Evidon's Global Opt Out page you can give some 200 more the boot — but that's only about 300 companies out of 1300. And even if they all comply with your opt-out request, it doesn't mean that they'll stop collecting data on you, only that they'll stop serving you targeted ads."

5 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. It's over. Privacy war lost. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Enough to drive an honest man to fraud.

  2. Data by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Does anyone know how he got the data they had on him? I'm looking at the opt out pages he listed and I don't see data recovery functions.

  3. Hosts file on the router... by Holistic+Missile · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I use some domain blocking entries, plus a hosts file from http://pgl.yoyo.org/as/serverlist.php?showintro=0;hostformat=hosts on my router, with local DNS enabled. It redirects about 2500 URLs to 127.0.0.1. DD-WRT for the win! I would imagine other third-party firmware allows this, too. When I have company, they sometimes comment how much better the web pages look and how fast they load on their laptops when they use my AP. They also wonder why Facebook and Twitter don't work... :-)

    --
    When you're dead, you don't know you're dead. It only affects the people around you. Same thing when you're stupid.
  4. Re:Use Ghostery! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I use ghostery and love it and all. But I wonder if passive resistance is the wrong way to go about this. Maybe what we need is to allow all those tracking cookies. But run a program on your computer which replaces the data in those cookies every 5-10 seconds. That is, instead of denying the marketers data (meaning the data they do get is still good), pollute their data so this whole business of tracking is less effective.

  5. Holy Crap by wibblewibble · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If you want to see Ghostery at work, try that link to the first opt-out site http://www.networkadvertising.org/choices/ with Ghostery running - the list of blocks scrolled right off the bottom of my page.