Beware !!! You are being Tracked
You surf the web and can avoid other sites that use tools from Facebook, Twitter and Googleand other websites which give you ultimate social experience? But really can you do that? I guess that’s impossible. Whenever you visit a site having a Like button, data including the adress of the site you are visiting is sent to Facebook. No matter you are logged in or not, they will have all the information they need with your Facebook identity. With privacy issues at the vanguard of technology news, it is vital to note that these social media tools track user’s behaviour.
In computing, web browing history means the list of web pages you have been opening thoruout your browing session. It also give the associated data such as title of the website, type of website, time on each page you have visited which is recorded by the web browser itself. Apart from the web browser there are some third party applications too which can track the web history.the worrying part about third party applications tracking your web browsing history is that there are many things a company can do with the information that isnt so beneficial to its users.
Banner ads are one kind of ads which can track your browing hisotry. Each advert records a cookie in the browser, and when you visit another website with ads served by the same provider this cookie will be sent back with the referring URL. For example if you visit Facebook.com the tracking cookie will be set in your browser. Even after visiting Facebook, the tracking cookie will be sent to Facebook when Like buttons are loaded on other sides. How to avoid that?
The easiest way to avoid this is to delte all facebook cookies stored in your web broswer, or to surf the browser in incognito/ anonymous mode. Apart from these there are some more ways which can be effective in this regard.
Disconnect, an open source browser add-on developed by a former Google engineer, Brian Kennish can block third party tracking scripts from major data gatherers like Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Twitter etc. It blocks the tracker script from collecting data from the user, such as Facebook like buttons or those auto login sites, and de-personalizes the user’s searches on Google. A user can also use other computer proxies to hide their IP adress from the web sites they visit or other computer they communicate with on the internet during their browing session.
Since browsers play an ever more important role in our use of internet its obvious the subject of privacy keeps popping up. And with privacy comes the topic of how we are tracked on the web. While registering or doing business with a website, the user should always review its privacy policy to see how it will use your information. One should never do business with a site which does not have a clearly stated and transparent privacy policy.
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