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Tracking the Web Trackers
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."
Give us a list of all companies and their affili-shit domains and I'll block them. I'll even add them to my 'Hosts' file just to make apk happy.
You could be using Tor, or surfing through a proxy, denying cookies, etc.
Why make it easy for them?
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Enough to drive an honest man to fraud.
Ghostery (Firefox plugin) allows you to block these trackers, it works great and you can also see when sites are loading the tracking code.
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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.
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."
That line is the most important part of the story. The phrase "opt out" has been redefined by the marketers. You can not opt out of being tracked, you can only opt out of being reminded that you are being tracked. That is more than useless because it defuses the people most likely to be unhappy about these trackers with a false sense of safety.
Your only way to avoid being tracked is not to ever talk to the trackers in the first place. For the less technically inclined, the Ghostery plugin for firefox is pretty much set it and forget it. If you can handle looking underneath the hood of the internet, check out Request Policy which gives you extremely fine grained control over what stuff a webpage can pull in from other webservers. I default block all cross-site includes from other domains and white-list them on an individual basis and it really isn't too inconvenient. Besides the privacy benefits, it makes web pages load super fast when they don't have to pull in crap from 15 other servers.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.
I had a few users at work that were spending too much time on facebook, etc. and management asked me to block it except during breaks. So I fire up an old box and put squid on it and tell AD to force them to proxy through it.
I then did a tail -f on the /var/log/squid3/access.log file and howdy boy do some sites have a lot of crap called when you load a page. Even our small town local newspaper site would call up about 30 different domains on each page load. Some of them would put a java script in to refresh each minute to see how long one stayed on the page.
Now I see why I run no-script and ABP on my boxes.
I started blocking a lot of them but real work called and I'm guessing that I only got about a third of them.
The unfortunate thing is almost all the stuff on the web these days has a no-cache flag so running a proxy for web-cache/bandwidth reduction is almost useless. I only get about 2% cache hits.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
It's not like we didn't notice yet that all sending an "opt-out" EMail accomplishes is to increase the value of your mail address because now it is confirmed to be one you actually use.
The only way to stop trackers is to mislead them with false information and block as many tracking as you possibly can. Relying on those that benefit from tracking to comply with your requests is naive at best.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
I don't see what is actually the problem. Isn't that better to have somehow targeted ads?
As for breaching my privacy: I'm just a record in billions of records for those companies. I'm pretty sure they don't give a shit about me as an individual, they care about categories and segments and groups. So what if they know which website I look at and how frequently. We are not talking about companies using my facebook pictures or my wishlist on Amazon, it's just ads.
lucm, indeed.
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
No, no you can't. I just tried the Network Advertising Initiative opt out page. It doesn't work. Out of 96 sites, 0 worked. I also tried Evidon. Looks like about only 80% of them can be shut off from that page. And now I have a horrible suspicion that all I've done is confirmed my existence to spammers.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"