With more and more of our lives online, our privacy is becoming more at risk than ever before. How many social media accounts are you active on where you willingly share your personal details? How many accounts do you create online using your details? How many apps do you have installed that have permission to access your files, photos, camera and location? This might make you wonder if it’s even possible to remain anonymous online.
In this article, we’ll look at online tracking and how various apps and platforms can follow your every move. We’ll also examine a few cases where these activities have been made public. Finally, we’ll also look at a few measures you can take to stay safe online, the most effective of which is using a rotating proxy to hide your IP. Check out these specialized proxies.
In this article on online privacy, we’ll be covering the following topics:
- How And Why Are You Being Tracked?
- Who Collects Your Data?
- Can You Protect Yourself?
How And Why Are You Being Tracked?
There are many different ways that you’re being tracked online. One of the most common ways users are tracked is through cookies. Cookies are basically a storage file for the website you visit that is stored on your device. They remember how you interacted with the site, what pages you viewed or what items you’ve added to a wishlist or cart. They are meant to improve the user’s experience of the website.
However, many websites have recently used tracking cookies to gather your data. This data is often used to create targeted ads, and it’s sometimes sold to marketers for this purpose. However, there are also individuals that use this information for other cyber attacks such as identity theft, ransomware attacks, phishing attacks and others.
Unfortunately, cookies are just one of the many ways websites and apps can track users. Other tracking used include:
- Web beacons
- IP addresses
- Browser fingerprinting
- Wi-Fi and Bluetooth tracking
- Signal tracking through mobile towers
- Signal tracking from cell site simulators
- Location information leaks through apps and web browsing
Cases Where Apps Have Tracked Users
In recent years, many cases have been made public where platforms or apps have tracked users. Some of the most notable breaches in privacy come from strange sources, whereas others are quite obvious. Facebook and Google both received heavy pushback in 2019 when it became apparent that they used a developer tool to bypass Apple’s privacy rules, enabling them to build apps for iOS that collect user data.
In 2019 they also discovered about 6000 children’s apps that can collect the user’s data. Among these apps were Angry Birds Classic, Clean Master, Battery Doctor, Cheetah Keyboard and many others. After the sheer number of apps tracking users became public, stricter rules and features were implemented to prevent it.
Despite recent improvements to privacy features, many apps still track users without their knowledge. A recent study was done on iOS following the new privacy features that required the app to ask users if they wanted to be tracked. The research looked at 1759 iOS apps. Of these, a quarter claimed to not track users. However, 80% of them still tracked users without their knowledge.
Can You Protect Yourself?
With so many different ways that users can be tracked online, it might seem like an impossible uphill battle to protect your privacy.
Use A Rotating Proxy
Proxies are the best solutions to protect your online anonymity. While other measures, such as disabling location settings and such, are effective, they usually only help a little bit. However, using a rotating proxy will change your IP address with each new request making it impossible for websites or apps to track you. If you pair a rotating proxy with another measure, you’ll have powerful protection against online trackers.
Use A Private Browser
Another great measure that works well alongside a proxy is using a private proxy. While there are very few truly private browsers, there are some that block ads, analytics and social trackers by default, like the Firefox Focus app for mobile. For a true private browser, you can consider Tor.
Keep And Eye On Your Privacy And Tracking Settings
Monitor your accounts and app settings frequently to ensure that everything is still set to private and that tracking is disabled. This also applies to app permissions. You should check them and disallow permission that the app doesn’t require to function.
Don’t Post Personal Information
Pay attention to the information you post online. Don’t do it online if you’re unwilling to say or do something in person.
Final Thoughts
Our online privacy is important to most of us. Yet we’re surrounded by websites, apps and social media platforms that track our every move and collect our data to sell to the highest bidder. As such, it’s important to become aware of how our data is collected and used and what we can do to prevent this invasion of privacy.
