Technology Tips – Published December 2022 in the Guide and Digest
By Don Trauger – Kennett
Cookies, beacons, digital signatures, trackers, and other technologies you probably haven’t heard of let advertisers, businesses, governments, and even criminals build a profile about what you do, who you know, and who you are at very intimate levels of detail. Back in 2012, a story about how a major store could tell a teenager was pregnant before her parents knew was based on her online activities. It’s still that way today. Google and Facebook are the most notorious commercial internet spies, and among the most pervasive, but they are hardly alone.
Are you defenseless against these invasive probes for information? No, you are not. But you must take defensive action.
It’s important to understand what is typically tracked. Most websites and services don’t actually know it’s you at their site. All they know is that it is a browser associated with a lot of characteristics that can then be turned into a profile. Marketers and advertisers are looking for certain kinds of people, and they use profiles to do so. For that need, they don’t care who the person actually is. Neither do criminals and organizations seeking to commit fraud or manipulate an election.
Signing up at a web site is a very favorable way for web sites to build a profile about you. If they ask for personal information like your name, age, gender, address and phone number be suspicious of their intent. They will comb through everything they can in your computer to build their profile about your online activities. Depending on the web site your information can be for sale across the Internet. You can foresee that it will spread just like Covid.
Since your choice of browsers is extremely important regarding your privacy concerns, choose one that is highly rated such as Microsoft’s Edge. Mozilla’s Firefox is also very good. Chrome is not the browser to use if you are concerned about how your information may be used.
To help you set up high level privacy on your MS Edge browser, please read my earlier articles about privacy on our web site at: https://hersheysmill.org/resources/technology/computer-security-tips/microsoft-edge-and-security-feb-2022/ and https://hersheysmill.org/resources/technology/general-computer-printer-tips/pc-ad-blockers-updated-june-2022/ which discusses adding extensions to Edge for ad blocking as well as privacy.
When you are done, run an online test of your security by going to the following web site: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/. Scroll down and click TEST YOUR BROWSER. Wait until the test completes. Scroll down to view your results. You should see strong protection against Web tracking in your results.
Yes, there are even more things you can do, but to keep privacy at a reasonably high level this will go a long way