Don’t like being tracked?

Me neither.

There are hundreds of companies out there making money off your data, finding out stuff about you that even you don’t know, and making decisions about you based on profiles of you that you don’t have access to.

If, like me, you consider this to be a bit rude; there are some ways to thwart this data-grabbing.

Private browsing

If you browse in ‘Private’ or ‘Incognito’ mode, your browsing history and cookies will be cleared when you close your browser.

This doesn’t stop you from being tracked while you’re using the browser though.

Block trackers

For that, you need a tracking-blocker. I use Privacy Badger together with uBlock Origin.

If you don’t want to see annoying flashy videos or animated banners either, you need something like NoScript, which stops the code that causes the annoying stuff from running. You will probably have to tinker to make sure you can still use features of the websites you actually want to use.

Clean up

Clear your cookies after you’ve finished browsing. Otherwise you may see ‘personalised’ (aka ‘as high a price as they think you can afford’) pricing when you’re shopping online. (Guardian article about this).

Donate to a privacy-defending organisation

These groups spend their time trying to protect people like you and me against people who don’t care about you as anything more than a revenue-generating datapoint. Support them.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

None Of Your Business (NOYB)

Open Rights Group (ORG)

These are just ordinary links, no affiliate referrer info or unique codes.