Disable Websites from Tracking You For Better Privacy

Cookies are one of the main components of a browser, they are used to store logins etc. Many ad agencies store cookies which track you all over the web. These cookies will personalize the ads you see on the web. Most of the people don’t like this as this is kind of privacy intrusion and may be you’re one of them. If you are so curious to know the sites which are tracking you, there are a few tools to do so.

Collusion

Using Collusion to trace the trackers Collusion is an interactive way to know who’s tracking you, in real-time. It’s actually a Firefox add-on, once it’s installed, head on to their site(on Firefox) and start browsing as you would normally do. After a few seconds of browsing you will see an interactive image showing dots which correspond to sites.

Features of Collusion

  • An interactive way to track your trackers in real-time.
  • Each dot correspond to a website (which is tracking you).
  • The red ones are confirmed trackers and the grey ones are not confirmed, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t track you.
  • Hover your cursor over a dot to know more about it.

Unfortunately Collusion doesn’t have a feature to block the detected trackers, but Firefox has an inbuilt feature to block trackers, you can enable this feature from the options window (image below). Image 04 Link: Collusion

Ghostery

As Collusion is Firefox-only, Chrome users can make use of Ghostery which is quite similar to Collusion but also gives an option to block trackers. Trackers found at New York times

Features of Ghostery

  • When you load a website after installing Ghostery, you get the trackers and respective info under it (as shown in the image).
  • Click on More info to get extra information about the trackers, you can view what data each tracker collects from you.

Information about trackers

  • Block trackers, this one is an experimental feature. If you’re not satisfied with Ghostery’s performance in blocking trackers, you may try Keep My Opt Outs for Chrome.

Link: Ghostery Do you really care about privacy? We like to hear that in the comments.

One Comment

Riten Jain July 25, 2011

I have been using firebox from long time but never noitice this feature. Thanks for bringing out this informative post.