A recent PEW report says that 86 percent of people have taken action to avoid online surveillance, including simple things like clearing their browser cache, as well as using more effective methods, such as using a VPN (virtual private network). The same report says that 61 percent of participants indicated that they’d like to do more.
Many people understand their privacy is at risk when they do things online, and want to do something about it. But that’s easier said than done. Not only do you have to have the will to make it happen, but you have to know where to start. Who do you want to protect your privacy from anyway? Facebook? The NSA? Nosey neighbors?
PEW’s report says that 91 percent of people agree or strongly agree that consumers have lost control over personal information that is collected and used by companies. So if you want to take this control back, the first thing you need to do is figure out who’s stalking you online.
F-Secure’s Freedome VPN, which you can try for free, has baked-in tracking protection technologies to help people protect their privacy while they’re surfing online. It also has Tracker Mapper – a feature that people can use to control how they expose themselves to Internet trackers. Tracker Mapper has been available for Macs and Windows PCs for about half a year, and was just launched for Freedome’s Android and iOS apps.
So how does using Tracker Mapper help you control your online privacy? Here’s our Chief Research Officer, Mikko Hyppönen, talking about how online tracking threatens people’s privacy, and how Freedome (and Tracker Mapper) can help people protect themselves.
I ran a little experiment to help me learn how to limit my exposure to trackers while planning a vacation. I used Alexa to help me find some popular travel websites that I could use to shop for deals on hotels. After that, I turned on Tracker Mapper (which is turned off by default, because we respect the fact that people don’t want apps to create logs without permission) so I could find out which of these websites used the most tracking to study me as I used their site.
I chose 5 of the more popular sites, and then I spent about 10 minutes on each, and left a bit of extra time so I could check out the results in between. The whole thing took me about an hour, giving me a one-hour log of the tracking attempts Freedome blocked while I browsed these sites.
Tracker Mapper creates an interactive visualization of the blocked tracking attempts, and gives you information on what trackers attempted to monitor you on different websites. It also shows how these trackers link together to create a network capable of monitoring you as you navigate from website to website.
These are screenshots showing how Tracker Mapper visualizes online tracking, as well some of the statistics it provides. The capture on the left shows the entire overview of the session (which lasted exactly one hour). The shot in the middle shows the sites I visited ordered by the most tracking attempts. The capture on the right shows the actual trackers that attempted to track me during my session, ordered by the number of blocked attempts.
Based on this, Trip Advisor appears to have made the most tracking attempts. But you can learn even more about this by combining Tracker Mapper with a bit of online digging.
You can tap on the different “bubbles” in Tracker Mapper to pull up statistics about different websites and tracking services. The first screen capture shows how many tracking attempts from different services were blocked when I visited Trip Advisor. The next two show the most prominent tracking services Freedome blocked – the tracker that TripAdvisor has integrated into its website (www.tripadvisor.com), and a tracking tag from Scorecard Research (b.scorecardresearch.com).
As you might have guessed, TripAdvisor’s own tracking service is only used on their website (it’s what’s called “first-party tracking”). That’s why Tracker Mapper doesn’t show any connections between it and other websites.
The second one, Scorecard Research, is used on both Trip Advisor and Lonely Planet. That’s why there are lines connecting it with both (it’s what’s called “third-party tracking”). Scorecard research is a marketing research firm that provides tracking and analytic services by having websites host their “tags”, which collect information about those website’s visitors. The Guardian has an excellent write-up about Scorecard Research, but what’s missing from the Guardian story is that you can opt-out of Scorecard Research’s tracking. Basically, they put a cookie on your browser, which isn’t an uncommon way for tracking companies to allow web surfers to protect their privacy (and oddly enough, a common way for them to track you).
Stripping trackers out of websites lets people take control of who’s monitoring what they do online. PEW’s survey found that this idea of control is central to people’s concerns about online privacy – 74 percent of respondents said it’s important to control who can get information, and 65 percent said its important to control what information is collected.
However, opting out of every tracking service (and for every browser you use) by installing opt-out cookies isn’t as convenient as using Freedome. And as F-Secure Security Advisor Sean Sullivan pointed out in this blog post, it actually works much better for your browsing (one experiment found that Freedome can reduce the time it takes to load web pages by about 30 percent, and decrease data consumption by about 13 percent).
You can download Freedome for a free trial and find out for yourself if how it can help you control your online privacy. And right now, you can win free annual subscriptions, as well as cool swag (like stylish hoodies) by posting a screenshot showing your blocked tracking attempts to F-Secure’s Facebook wall, or on Instagram with F-Secure tagged.
The contest is open till March 23rd, and 5 winners will be randomly drawn after it ends.
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