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."

Comments

Use Ghostery!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ghostery (Firefox plugin) allows you to block these trackers, it works great and you can also see when sites are loading the tracking code.

Re:Use Ghostery!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Data

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Only Opt out of Being Reminded

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.