How to avoid being tracked while surfing online? July 24, 2006
Posted by balajinjl in Privacy, Security.add a comment
We all know that online surfing habits are being tracked. Whenever you visit a site, the site places a cookie and the user is identified by this cookie on their computer. So in order to avoid being tracked, most of the security paranoid people will ask you to turn off cookies. The unfortunate side effect of this is that you won’t be able to log-on to majority of the sites because their log-in authentication is based on the cookies.
This results in catch-22 situation. To find solution to this problem, we need to understand how tracking is done. For majority of the sites, tracking of users is done by third party companies like adtmt, google analytics etc. Trust me no company wants to build their own tracking and reporting mechanism. (Been there, done that and it’s a big pain).
So how does this work. Let’s take an example, www.somecompany.com is the website and trackingcompany.com is the tracking company. When one visits a website i.e. http://www.somecompany.com/ , web pages of somecompany.com contains a link to a gif image and / or a javascript file residing on trackingcompany.com servers. When the browser loads the webpage on the client (your desktop), it also loads the gif image and/or the javascript file from the trackingcompany’s servers. At this point tracking company places a cookie on your computer. One of the attributes of the cookie is domain name and in this case it will be trackingcompany.com. In addition to this somecompany.com will also place a cookie for session management and/or for authentication. The domain name attribute for the second cookie will be somecompany.com. The user visited http://www.somecompany.com/ and got minimum two cookies. One from the trackingcompany and other from somecompany. Tracking company cookies are called third party cookies and one can easily block third party cookies. No third party software to be installed. Its just a simple configuration in your browser and it will do the trick.
In IE, Go to Tools, Internet options, Privacy, Advanced.
Check ‘Override automatic cookie handling’, Under ‘First-party cookies’ click ‘Accept’, Under ‘Third-party cookies’ click ‘Block’, Click ‘Ok’ and ‘Ok’ to accept changes.
In FF, Go to Tools, Options, Privacy, Cookies, check ‘Allow sites to set cookies’, Check ‘for originating sites only’
That’s it. You have blocked majority of tracking companies. Clear your browser cache and cookies and start surfing.
Be safe,
-Balaji NJL
