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Ask Slashdot: How Much of Your Online Browsing Can Advertisers See?
dryriver writes: We all know the phenomenon of browsing from an internet site A to a completely unrelated internet site B, and having identical ads follow you from site A to site B. Logic suggests that some kind of advertising system is following you from site A to B, and possibly onto subsequent sites C, D and E as well. Logic also suggests that this advertising system can now put together a nice long list of whatever you are looking at online. So here's the question: How much of your online browsing is "monitored" or "logged" this way by advertisers? Can there be any realistic expectation of privacy on the internet if the default behavior of advertisers is to track you as much as they can?
Install the firefox self destructing cookies plugin. This is how cookies should work. Unless you whitelist the domain, its cookies are destroyed 10 seconds after you leave their page. Others go further with adblock, but just this with kill the tracking.
I change my online identity on a regular basis. That's the best strategy. They can keep terabytes of tracking logs about jdoe411 if that amuses them, when I switch to redsoxfan4life it's going to be a blank slate. The first few times that I did that I was mostly annoyed by the bookmarks I was losing, but I long stopped copying them over. The fresh start is always great.
lucm, indeed.
Thank you. I initially thought you were mistaken, cause I'm familiar with ETags, but I hadn't thought it all the way through. Those are some sneaky buggers.
FWIW for others, ETags are optional, and generated server side per resource. They are used to determine if an item you have cached needs refreshed (if the etag you have differs, you need the updated version). That happens to be done server side... if you already have a resource, you send an HTTP request to the server, and your request headers include "If-None-Match", which has the ETag. If you send an ETag to the advertising server, they can misuse that feature and just send you back the same tag... this is how they end up tracking you (or part of it), as they can associate a unique ID with you because you always send them that same ETag.
I used to use all that crap until I found out about PiHole. Now I just have my networks clients use it for the primary name server. The DNS requests to the ad servers never make it out of my network, so they never see any requests from me. For the few things that do make it through, uBlock Origin gets those until the PiHole lists get updated. It's also pretty damned effective at eliminating telemetry data from making it outside the network.
Now, PiHole is basically just a glorified hosts file, but it allows me to handle things for the entire network instead of a device by device basis, as well as protecting those devices where I can't get at a hosts file (ie, mobiles)
Of course, this doesn't do anything about websites that set cookies and share their own data with advertisers, but there are other tools for dealing with that.