Slashdot Mirror
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?
of it
Advertising content puts tracking cookies in your browser. Due to how cookies work, they are associated with the advertiser, not the website you're looking at. This means that the advertiser will see the *same* tracking ID whenever their content appears regardless of the site they're advertising on. Since they know what sites they're advertising on, they can match that with the tracking ID they've dropped on you to assemble a history of what sites you're browsing through. Including giving you the same ads.
This is the "forgotten" reason why people run ad-blockers: to nix the tracking data across websites!
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.
Want more privacy, absolutely do not run windows anal probe 10 because if you do, you have already lost. Next up run add ons to control your internet experience, the first up a script blocker to block scripts you do not like especially bad advertiser scripts add to that a cookie control add on to either block cookies from particular sites or make them session only and delete them when you leave.
I prefer to control what is allowed to run and what is blocked. So for advertisers, show me shit ads and you are blocked, just one shit ad advertising crap products or services and that also includes ending up at a bad site, those providing ads services to that bad site and you are done, from there on in. You behave yourself with those ads and fine, they might even be informative.
Google search is becoming nothing but google ads, it is starting to look very much like the old asta la vista and MSN, all you see is ads on first the screen, drop to the bottom and look the fucking arse holes have dumped all ads at the bottom, you now have to try to find the bit in between to see your actual search and the shit fucks did that on purpose to force you to read the ads. Google is just becoming more and more shite, from the YouTube advertiser friendly horse shit to google advertiser search bullshit. M$ would have a chance now with MSN search but they decide to be douche bags with Windows anal probe 10.
Why is it, that old tech companies must go down, to be replaced by new client respecting companies, whom then become douche bag corporatists and must again be replaced. Why the crazy stupid business style, is it an American thing, is that the norm for American business, start small and customer orientated become big and become customer abusive.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Advertisers are idiots.
I go on line and search for something. I find a good deal and buy it. NOW they start popping up ads for that thing*.
*A specialty tool for fixing my car. It's likely I will never need another.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
98% slashdot, 2% everything else. Slashdotters don't deny it, be proud of it.
How much can the trackers/advertisers on your own site see? There are enough: rpxnow.com, crsspxl.com, google-analytics.com, janrain.com, pro-market.net, taboola.com, ml314.com, and (lol) analytics.slashdotmedia.com.
Trolling is a art,
Unless you take extreme measures, which only a small minority do, they can see all of it, or so near as not to matter.
The measures you must take increasingly break web sites, because we the public have trained the sites that it is acceptable to require privacy invading features for basic functionality. The more sites are broken in this way, the less people are willing to take the measures that might cause them a tiny bit of inconvenience, and so the cycle continues.
The only way for this to be avoided was if the public would have had a backbone. That is something it did not have. So here we are.
you might return it and buy a similar item
your friend might want one too and the ad reminds you to tell him you just bought one and it was an awesome product
you might break the one you bought and need another
you buying one makes you more valuable to advertise the same item to then someone who didn't
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.
Also I get notified, with nice pictures, of lonely sex-starved MILFs who live "Only 400 away". 400 yards? 400 miles? Must be miles because no-one lives with 400 yards of me except an old farmer.
What you don't know is your old farmer neighbor is a pervert with a basement stocked with women.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch