Tracking the Web Trackers 97
itwbennett writes "Do you know what data the 1300+ tracking companies have on you? Privacy blogger Dan Tynan didn't until he had had enough of being stalked by grandpa-friendly Jitterbug phone ads. Tracking company BlueKai and its partners had compiled 471 separate pieces of data on him. Some surprisingly accurate, some not (hence the Jitterbug ad). But what's worse is that opting out of tracking is surprisingly hard. On the Network Advertising Initiative Opt Out Page you can ask the 98 member companies listed there to stop tracking you and on Evidon's Global Opt Out page you can give some 200 more the boot — but that's only about 300 companies out of 1300. And even if they all comply with your opt-out request, it doesn't mean that they'll stop collecting data on you, only that they'll stop serving you targeted ads."
Give Us A List (Score:3, Informative)
Give us a list of all companies and their affili-shit domains and I'll block them. I'll even add them to my 'Hosts' file just to make apk happy.
Use Ghostery! (Score:5, Informative)
Ghostery (Firefox plugin) allows you to block these trackers, it works great and you can also see when sites are loading the tracking code.
Re:Give Us A List (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't always work that way. Sometimes, these companies use their own sites, but other times, it's a no-name domain and sometimes a random IP. It's almost a kin to a botnet herder where they all report to a root domain where they get their instructions.
And other times these are from publicly available records; no direct connection to your web browser. If you buy a car, apply for a credit card or even register a new phone number, expect to get spammed shortly. The only way to not get included in a dossier of some sort is to not exist. But even that's no guarantee.
Only Opt out of Being Reminded (Score:5, Informative)
And even if they all comply with your opt-out request, it doesn't mean that they'll stop collecting data on you, only that they'll stop serving you targeted ads."
That line is the most important part of the story. The phrase "opt out" has been redefined by the marketers. You can not opt out of being tracked, you can only opt out of being reminded that you are being tracked. That is more than useless because it defuses the people most likely to be unhappy about these trackers with a false sense of safety.
Your only way to avoid being tracked is not to ever talk to the trackers in the first place. For the less technically inclined, the Ghostery plugin for firefox is pretty much set it and forget it. If you can handle looking underneath the hood of the internet, check out Request Policy [requestpolicy.com] which gives you extremely fine grained control over what stuff a webpage can pull in from other webservers. I default block all cross-site includes from other domains and white-list them on an individual basis and it really isn't too inconvenient. Besides the privacy benefits, it makes web pages load super fast when they don't have to pull in crap from 15 other servers.
Re:Use Ghostery! (Score:5, Informative)
Ghostery (Firefox plugin) allows you to block these trackers, it works great and you can also see when sites are loading the tracking code.
https://www.ghostery.com/ [ghostery.com]
Tail your proxy (Score:5, Informative)
I had a few users at work that were spending too much time on facebook, etc. and management asked me to block it except during breaks. So I fire up an old box and put squid on it and tell AD to force them to proxy through it.
I then did a tail -f on the /var/log/squid3/access.log file and howdy boy do some sites have a lot of crap called when you load a page. Even our small town local newspaper site would call up about 30 different domains on each page load. Some of them would put a java script in to refresh each minute to see how long one stayed on the page.
Now I see why I run no-script and ABP on my boxes.
I started blocking a lot of them but real work called and I'm guessing that I only got about a third of them.
The unfortunate thing is almost all the stuff on the web these days has a no-cache flag so running a proxy for web-cache/bandwidth reduction is almost useless. I only get about 2% cache hits.
Re:Give Us A List (Score:4, Informative)