Google and Facebook Top Biggest Web Tracker List 103
itwbennett writes "A new report from Evidon, whose browser plug in Ghostery tracks Web trackers, makes it plain that 'if you want to worry about somebody tracking you across the Web, worry about Google,' writes blogger Dan Tynan. Google and Facebook, and their various services, occupy all of the top 5 slots on the Evidon Global Tracker Report's list of the most prolific trackers. 'And if you have any tracking anxiety left over, apply it to social networks like Facebook, G+, and Twitter,' adds Tynan."
Collusion plugin (Score:5, Interesting)
Check out the Collusion plugin from Mozilla if you want to see for yourself who is tracking you and the relationships between them. Has a nice graphical overview.
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/collusion/
Re:Food for thought (Score:5, Interesting)
All I use Google for is search. I'd gladly pay for a non ad infested version. Google serves too many masters to be a decent search engine anymore.
Re:Is anyone surprised? (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you think logging out really does you any good? Chances are you can be uniquely identified from your browser's user agent string. Google remembers your IP. Google remembers the searches you do from that IP. Google has a bug on just about every website out there.
If you want to avoid Google, you need to use it only from a deidentified browser, behind an anonymizing proxy. You need to reject all scripts from Google, and reject all cookies. If you do all this, it will be a pain in the ass to get any work done, and I'm still not sure they won't be able to figure out who you are.
Re:Back in the day... (Score:2, Interesting)
They can track you by your browser's agent string (and even better when pairing it with an IP address). Research has discovered that agents strings tend to differ. If website A sees your agent string unique among it's 1 million users and website B has also seen your agent string, when they sell each other web logs they can both assume you visited both their sites. Of course it's not 100% exact, but it's statistically good enough to make that profile connection. Have you cleaned your agent string and other browser trackes lately?
In addition, websites make it harder and harder to not enable cookies. They'll keep redirecting you to a 'choose your location' page or toss up an error saying the site requires cookies to function. Luckily I love eating cookies and never go hungry when browsing the web. I'm about to munch on the FIVE I have relating to slashdot. One from slashdot and the other four with referrer info relating to links I've clicked on from here.
Why do I have a jobs.slashdot.org cookie? I don't have a slashdot account.