The Wall Street Journal looked a few days ago about just how pervasive cross-site web tracking has become. They took a “clean” system and visited the top 50 web sites and then looked very carefully to see how many “beacons” and other tracking mechanism had been implanted on their test computer.
After visiting 100 pages in each site, their computer had acquired 2,224 tracking devices from 131 companies (they were using Firefox for the study). The more sophisticated tools track your mouse movements and keystrokes studying how you interacted with the page. (the consultant they hired to do this is now working for the FTC)
The WSJ appeared on John Batchelor a few days ago, and the conclusion was basically that it’s getting so hard to block all of this stuff that you pretty much should assume everyone knows everything you’re doing and that information is being sold to anyone willing to buy it. Being logged into Google, Facebook, etc… pretty much ties your activities right back to your email address and ultimately you.
If you use Internet Explorer 8 and want a sense of just how much of this is going on, click on Tools / InPrivate Filtering (different than InPrivate Browsing). Even if you don’t have it turned on, IE 8 is counting the number of times it has seen the same item requested from 3rd party web sites. It takes 10 (default) before it appears on the list. If you’re an active web user, the list probably goes on for 100s of tracking devices.
InPrivate Filtering was designed in part not to work (Microsoft is very active in tracking :))… By default, it turns itself off every time you restart the browser. I’m just suspicious enough to guess that Microsoft would “White List” its own tracking services, since of course Microsoft is Good, it’s the rest of the world that is Evil.
If you use Firefox and the Adblock extension, but still use IE for some things, InPrivate Filtering can import lists of things to not load. Note that this is more comprehensive than deleting cookies and deleting temporary files and history. Once a tracking device has been spotted, the browser no longer will communicate with that tracking service and you become invisible… the tracking won’t even see your IP address because it never gets a request.
Here is a page that tells how to make InPrivate Filtering on permanently, and also has a list of AdBlock stuff you can import into the browser.
How To
(I’ve looked at what they’re having you download to make sure it is safe and does what it says it does – it’s okay)
Long term, it’s the advertising that pays for all the “free stuff” on the Web – so if everyone does this or the FTC\makes tight rules, that’s going to lead into the question of who is going to pay for the costs of all this free stuff on the Internet? [Barack Obama, of course]
