What is Internet Tracking? How to protect yourself from Internet Tracking

What is Internet Tracking? How to protect yourself from Internet Tracking

Nowadays we have become a vivid internet user, we depend on the internet for almost everything nowadays, whether it be for entertainment or our financial work. Due to this, online company and advertisement have started to track their customer’s online activities to gain profits out of it. Not just companies there are other illegal services which can track your online activities to gain personal information and use it to hack your system. So in this article, we are going to talk about what is internet tracking, how it is done and how as an internet user we can protect ourselves from such tracking.

What is Internet Tracking or Web Tracking?

Internet or Web tracking generally means collecting of information from the website or webpages you are interacting with. A web tracker can gather more information than just your visited site. It can track your IP address, your geographical locations, and your browsing behaviors. Web tracking is done by the website to improve our experience with that particular site just like TV commercials do. But most of the web tracking is done without our permission which is a big question on our online privacy.

What are the tracking mechanisms used by websites?

Well, there are three types of mechanism:- 1.Cookies 2. Web beacons and 3. Browser Fingerprinting

Cookies: it is the most widely used method to keep track of a user. Cookies are small files that are stored in your browser by a web server. So when a user visits a site for the first time the site stores a unique file with a unique identifier in their browser. It is used by a website to store information like preferences, some custom settings, and log-in information.

Web beacons: web beacons are invisible objects that are embedded in a website or emails. Most of them do not have any malicious objective but it can be used in a negative way too. Web beacons are also termed as page tags or pixel trackers. Usually, its main purpose is to let the owner of the website or the sender of the email know if their page or mail has been open by any users. A spammer can use it by sending emails to a lot of people and whenever someone opens the email the web beacon let the spammer know that the mail has been open.

Browser Fingerprinting:  Browser Fingerprinting is a complex and highly accurate method to identify or track a user whenever he or she goes online. Rather than storing any files to your browser, what it does is that it collect information about your browser type and version, your operating system and its version. It even collects information like your time, language, screen resolutions, and even your hardware configurations.

Is web tracking illegal?

Web tracking is not 100% illegal. It is done to improve our surfing experiences. But if the tracking is done without our permission it is considered illegal.

How to protect from web tracking?

There are multiple methods to protect from being track some of them are listed below.

1. Use track blocker extensions

Trackers are usually scripts that run when a site is loaded. These scripts once loaded starts to collect information including our IP address and browsing behavior. Block tracker plugins are available for both Chrome and Mozilla Firefox as add-ons. These add-ons will stop website trackers from collecting information and also protects you from browser fingerprinting. It also helps by blocking ads from the page you are surfing because most of these ads have tracking scripts that help the advertisers to track their ads efficiency.

2. Use a VPN

VPN (Virtual Private Network) will help to keep your browsing private and anonymous. VPN routes the traffic through another virtual network with different IP Address. VPN helps by preventing the tracker to get your exact geographical location and IP Address.

3. Enable Do Not Track

By enabling the do not track feature in your browser can prevent the website from collecting information from your computer. It works by requesting the site you visit not to track your information. However, it is not the most effective way because it only works with some sites. But it can be the first step that a user can take towards internet privacy.

Conclusion

By avoiding web/internet tracker will not just help you in protecting your privacy online, but it will also help you to save money because most of the advertisers and website use the data to determine the price of their site but also influence your buying behavior.