A new article to be added in Chapter 5:Protect yourself and all your devices against tracking for FREE
The idea behind tracking is actually a good one. Imagine that you search on Amazon for “hard drive 500 gb”. This website drops a cookie in your browser which gets saved locally. If you are logged on in your Amazon account, this is usually not needed because your entire activity is logged, but if you’re not, this is happening in order to be able to show you relevant products next time when you visit the website.
Nothing wrong here, it is actually helping you across visits.
But, this technology can also be misused. Imagine that a website, plugin, toolbar or anything else you have in your browser writes a cookie that many affiliate websites can read. So, to use the other example, one website writes the cookie about the product you were searching (hdd) and then all other affiliate websites can read it. Next time you visit any of them, you will automatically see ads about the products you searched on any other website. Even if this might seem like a innocent action, it is actually an attack on your privacy. You never gave your consent to be tracked across multiple domains.
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All these and many more topics are in the free eBook "Improve your security" available here: www.improve-your-security.org.