From the moment you connect your laptop or phone to the internet, you have to make peace with the fact that somebody’s tracking you. If this is upsetting, you should know you’ve got a growing number of options for finding out who is following your every move on the internet, and why.
Shining a light on this is a great reminder of the privacy and security implications of going online, which in turn will help you make better decisions regarding how exposed you want to be.A few trackers might relate to social media networks or analytics platforms—sites use them to learn more about their visitors. But most of these pieces of code relate to advertising networks, collecting information about your browsing habits and serving you ads that might be relevant to you based on this data.
This kind of tracker is what causes the exact pair of shoes you were looking at to appear alongside an article you’re reading, whether you went shoe shopping six months or a moment before. These are the ones we should be most careful about, says Jeremy Tillman, president at Ghostery, a tool for identifying online trackers.
“To put it bluntly, these trackers are stealing your data in order to sell it back to you later, in the form of products and services,” he says. Trackers can also have a significantly negative impact on page loading times, as sites that have a lot of them give your browser a heavier workload.