As great as communicating over laptops, PCs, and mobile devices can be, there are also drawbacks. Learn how to minimize trackers.
One is the persistent dropping of cookies and other trackers on your screen as you browse. Unless you are very computer adept, you may not realize that cookies and multiple trackers are there.
Minimize Trackers
But you see the evidence of them in the ads you see as you move through pages on the internet. Say you were shopping for shoes on a site, for example. On your next site, or when you go to your e-mail, you might see advertising banners for shoes, maybe even from the same company. Same with lawn equipment.
They’re reading your browsing interests (and making decisions about what your interests are) via trackers.
There are several ways to stop trackers. All are very simple and knowing how is one of the great computer tips of the day.
Search Engines
First, you can use a search engine that vows not to track people. Yes, despite the ubiquity of Google as a search engine and tracker, there are alternatives. One, mentioned in Julia Angwin’s book Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance, is Duck-Duck Go. (Angwin is a reporter who writes about the commonplace tracking of Americans through computers.) It can be found at https://duckduckgo.com/. Simply set it as your default search engine, just as you would search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, or the others.
The advertisements will disappear virtually overnight. You see, the cookies and trackers are so your search engine makes money by, among other things, selling your buying behavior. It’s a marketing tactic, and your browsing history is tracked and marketed by these companies. Some, though, have been formed specifically not to track people.
Software
Second, you can install software that tells you what trackers are on a given screen and gives you the option to block them or not. The most popular is Ghostery. It can be downloaded at https://www.ghostery.com/. Go through and choose to see the trackers. A list of names will pop up in a purple balloon. You will see the option to block or unblock. You can block with a click, or choose not to block.
Both are free to use, and will give you a great sense of how many trackers there are out there.
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