Somebody’s tracking you

Hello Friends! In this post I am going to talk about, how you are being tracked continuously with or without your knowledge when you do your daily activities over the web.

Coming straight to the point let me ask you a question, have you ever noticed that the ads that you are seeing on one of your device is inspired from your activities on another? I am sure most of you have answered “Yes”. We are about to find out how.

Tracking Cookies

Cookies are small text files that are placed in your browser’s directory that stores specific information related to a website that you have directly or indirectly accessed. Tracking cookies are those that stores info on your browsing behavior and other online activities along with a unique id. These files are placed by different advertising networks on your browser. Different websites that uses the services of these sites to display ads on their pages consequently runs advertising networks’ scripts on their websites. These scripts reads the cookies and discovers users’ browsing behavior across different sites. Based on this information their algorithm decides which ads to display.

Advertising ID(s)

As mobile apps does not have cookies mechanism, the mobile operating system provides a user resettable unique id called as mobile advertising ID. This ID is used by advertisers to target ads to the users and measure their campaign success ratio.

Cross Device Tracking

Cross Device Tacking is a mechanism by which advertisers and marketers tracks your search patterns across different devices such as PC, TV, Mobile devices, by placing unique id(s), cookies etc.

Browser Fingerprinting

Browser fingerprinting is a method by which it is possible to identify your browser uniquely by profiling information about your browser such as different combinations of plugins that are installed, OS version, browser version, timezone etc.

What do we do?

If you are someone who gets uncomfortable about the fact that your activities across websites and devices are getting synchronized and your behavior on one device affects the experience on another, these are the things that you can do:

• Follow Discipline: Install 2 or more browser on your devices one for all the sensitive works and another one for casual and day to day work.
• Clear Cookies: Clear browser cookies from time to time. You can also use third party browser extension for these.
• Logout: Always logout of sites. If you want an easy way to login you could always use a secure password manager.
• Advertiser ID Reset: Reset mobile advertiser ID on your device from time to time.
• VPN: If possible use VPN to browse sensitive websites.

Are these steps enough?

Are we free from tracking if we follow all the above steps? The answer is perhaps not. In today’s big-data oriented world there are so much more ways and mechanism to track you that a full proof plan is more difficult to arrive at than it appears. For instance do you know that companies are using audio beacons i.e. inaudible voices emitted by one device and being tracked by another, to achieve cross device tracking.

In conclusion, there is not a sure shot mechanism to avoid being tracked but we can follow good practices and discipline to safeguard ourselves from illegitimate tracking and online frauds.