Do you check your privacy settings in your browser? More people today are concerned with their privacy exposure on the internet. For example the geographical location, the digital footprint and personal information.
Image by Darwin Laganzon from Pixabay
What are the things being tracked
As long as you are an Internet user, you yourself are tagged with an Internet Protocol address (IP Address). By looking at the IP address, it can tell which country the user comes from and with the combination of other information such as router mac address, it can even trace to your doorstep.
The browsing history, Browser keeps the browsing history of an user. The urls of the page, page click, time visits are kept in the browser. It claims to improve the user experience, and browsing history helps users quickly find their visited page. However, that data might also be used for advertising. The browser can use that data and sell it to the advertiser for advertisement targeting.
Tracking scripts embedded in the website is another way to allow the provider to track their user behaviour. It includes the previous page the user has visited, the type of content the user read in the past, the keywords they are searching for. With that information, the provider will be able to push the relevant advertisement to you on a website which has enrolled in an advertisement earning scheme. Aside from that, those footprints can also be sold to website owners to understand their user behaviour on the owner’s website. So the owner can target their user with contents which can convert them to become their customers.
Used incognito, private browsing
Incognito, private browsing does reduce the chance of being tracked. However tracking can still happen if one logged in to his account and keeps his session alive until he restarts the incognito browser.
Private browsing creates a lot of friction when a user needs to login again and again. Also if a user is too used to using the extension in their daily life. Using incognito mode will lose the benefits of using those extensions. Though you can enable it in the settings, once you have enabled it looks no difference if you use it in a normal browser.
Enable, disable Chrome privacy settings
There are few settings we can play around to enhance our privacy. This video has listed out 20 settings you can change on your chrome.
Have list them out some:
- Auto delete activity
- Block third-party cookies
- Secure DNS
- Block notifications
- Block pop up
- Changes Duckduckgo as default search engine
- Scan for harmful softwares
Alternatives
There are other privacy focused browsers (Brave, Firefox Safari, Duckduckgo) which use other mechanism to block the tracking.