[talk] Personalization

Brian Cully bcully at gmail.com
Tue Jul 25 09:16:33 EDT 2017


> On 24-Jul-2017, at 17:01, Pete Wright <pete at nomadlogic.org> wrote:
> 
> while cookie data (and to a limited extent - local storage) is used by adtech sites, a majority of the tracking that happens is via 3rd party tracking pixels publishers inject into their websites.  for example if i load www.latimes.com there will be *lots* of calls to 3rd parties which will then obviously collect and analyzie your browsing behavior as you go from page to page and site to site. cookies tend to be used as a placeholder for a UUID associated with whatever device you are using at the time, although for mobile devices that's not even really needed anymore.
> 
> tl;dr just use "privacy mode" in your browser + ublock + ghostery (plus other extensions i'm sure) and you have a decent shot in being semi-private on the commercial internet.
> 

	If you use a Mac as your primary personal machine, I’d highly recommend using Little Snitch, an outbound firewall, as well as your standard suite of ad/tracker blocking. It can be annoying at first as you have to approve/deny a ton of connections, but that settles down after a while. You can also just put it in passive mode and go through it’s logs later to create rules.

	I’ve found a lot of things that AdBlock doesn’t catch, and you can use it for any application, which, more and more, have started integrating trackers into themselves.

-bjc


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