Have you ever come across an advertisement for a product or service you were talking about a while ago? Coincidence or technological advancement?
The internet might know much more about you than you already know about yourself. All online social networking sites or search engines you use are free to use at the expense of your virtual consumption privacy. This means the internet almost always knows your personal details like your interests, habits, favorite vacation spot, and so on.
The surprising thing about this practice is that this type of tracking is legal and done by many well-known websites. It includes tracking activities like your current location, the voice notes you send to your Google Assistant, your buying and selling behavior, etc.
Here is how browsers track your activities in general: as soon as you access a browser, your IP address starts reporting along with your current location, the browser you are using like Firefox or Bing, or even the battery level if you are using it on your laptop or mobile.
The browser searches are used by social networking sites like Facebook that incorporate this information with their systems to show you relevant ad campaigns.
Take Google, for instance, which collects crucial information about you like your age, date of birth, where you live, and your interests to suggest the best advertisements, products and services that would be most suitable for you and your daily life needs.
Google:
For Google, you can visit the page “Welcome to My Activity.” Once you click on the link, you will land on a page that shows you options like:
- Website History
- Location History
- Youtube History
You can check your website and application activity from this section in detail and observe for yourself how you have been suggested ads in the past months according to your online surfing. However, whether you want to enable or disable the activity saving settings for all the three options mentioned above is up to you.
Another way the internet knows more about you is through cookies. As most of the websites need to know about the visitor activity to give each user a more personalized experience, most of them will be dropping cookies on their websites. These cookies help the website owner identify each visitor and user and have little bits of information they provide on the website. These bits of data can be the email address you provided them for the newsletter subscription, or the city name you selected to have a personalized category for the products on the website, or simply the links you open.
Not only search engines like Google or Bing are known for collecting internet users’ information for appropriate presentation of advertisements and content. Social media networking sites like Facebook and Instagram also come under the same category of collecting personal information of the internet user and then using it for optimized and automated advertisements and content suggestions.
Here is how you can look at what Facebook knows about you:
Off-Facebook activities are a brief description of your activities with other businesses and applications that are provided to Facebook. In this way, Facebook tracks your consumer behavior and presents you with the most relevant information and content.
According to Facebook, every time you search for a product or service online, Facebook tracks your activities through the information that the company or website share with Facebook. Facebook then generates more personalized advertisements for you.
As far as the apps and web activities on Facebook are concerned, it will be with Facebook even after you delete your account.
You can access what Facebook is tracking by clicking on the three-line menu icon and going into Settings.
After that, you can click on the “Off Facebook Activity” in the “Your Facebook Information” header. You can further check the activity tracking for each application by clicking on the “Manage Your Off Facebook Activity” in the “What You Can Do” header.
If you think Facebook is too intrusive, you can delete all the data by clicking on “Clear History.”
What can we do?
In case you don’t mind websites collecting your data and actually enjoy getting personalized ads – no need for changes. If you just want to see how much the internet knows about you – use Nuwber. Search for your name, or even phone number, and see what data is already available about you on the web. You may evaluate the situation and think on which website you have provided those pieces of information.
After considering all the ways your information can be accessed on the internet, feeling a bit anxious is also understandable. Although we know that since it is a digitalized world and we can’t ignore but simply adhere to the policies websites provide us with, we can stay protected if we take preventive measures. Some of them are:
- Do not sign up for websites that you are only going to use once. This can lead to unnecessary data collection for a website you are not even going to access afterward. Your data can be in considerable danger.
- Use geotag removers for the images you upload on social media.
- Disable your location for normal internet surfing, except when needed, like calling a cab or ordering food, etc.
- Do not accept cookies if you do not feel comfortable surfing on a website.
- Use a VPN that will keep your location and IP address protected.
- Disable your web activities saving for browsers like Chrome. Switch to browsers that don’t track your internet activities – like Tor.
- Personalize your advertisement suggestions on Facebook.
Conclusion: Technology has been drastically evolving all these years and will continue doing so. Nowadays, we are tracked through our activities online so that we are given more relevant content. Browsers like Google or Firefox, social media sites such as Facebook have segments of vital information that would assist them in tracking our online behavior. Although legal, this can sometimes be a genuine concern: how much are we being tracked online?
However, just like mentioned above, you can limit the information access for many of these sites and not let them observe you. You can also take the measures which are discussed in this article to keep yourself safer online.
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