Instructions for blocking Google user tracking

Many things have been created at Google's new privacy policy and have worked since March 1, 2011. If you are concerned about Google misusing your personal information or sharing too much with advertisers, there are many ways to prevent this tracking.

However, what are you really trying to prevent? You do not become anonymous when blocking tracking cookies, Web beacons and other types of tracking when surfing the web. ISPs and visited websites still know a lot about you, identifying information that is done automatically by the browser in use.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF - a non-profit organization that protects the legal rights of Internet and digital users ) provides Panopticlick service that can assess the browser anonymity. This test will show you the identity information provided by the browser and create a numerical evaluation. This review shows how easy it is to identify you based on the browser trace.

According to the entropy theory explained by Peter Eckersley on EFF's DeepLinks blog, 33 bits of entropy are enough to identify a person. According to Eckersley, knowing the date of birth (no need for years) and someone's ZIP code gives you 32 bits of entropy. Besides, knowing one's gender (50/50 - a bit of entropy) gives you another bit to reach the 33 bit threshold.

When we ran the test process on a Mac Mini computer, it reported 20.89 bits of identifiable information, according to the formula for calculating entropy, it was not enough to identify. However, sometimes we want the sites we visit so know a little bit about ourselves because personal information is the popularity of the website.

Panopticlick of the Electronic Frontier Foundation will scan and create a numerical evaluation of the browser anonymity.

Somehow, Google's explanation of personalized advertising has more information than its privacy policy. Of course, it is part of Google's campaign to keep users with personal advertising, but the company also tries to do the best it can to bring personal benefits to users. It will definitely help pay for the free services we use today.

Use Google's tools to select an ad network

The most obvious of Google's privacy policies are links to services that allow users to view and manage the information you share with Google. Some of the personal data is voluntary by you, and some of it is Google that collects every time you search, surf the web and use other services.

To see everything (almost everything) Google knows about you, users can open the Google Dashboard. Here, you can access all your Google account related services: Gmail , Google Docs , YouTube , Picasa , Blogger , AdSense , and all other Google accounts. The dashboard panel also allows you to manage your contacts, calendar, Google Groups , Web history , Google Voice accounts and other services.

Get information about all Google services related to your account in a single place through the Google Dashboard.

More importantly, users can view and edit personal information saved by each Google service, or delete the service. To see if there is any other service accessing your account information, click on ' Websites authorized to access the account ' at the top of the Dashboard. To block an unauthorized service from accessing your account, click Revoke Access next to the service name.

See if the service can access information in your Google account via a link on the Google Dashboard.

The Google Ads Preferences Manager allows users to block some advertisers or select all advertisers. Click the Ads on the Web link in the left column and then select ' Add or edit ' under the ' Your categories and demographics ' section to select the categories you want to be served or select the fish ads. impersonal.

Google's Ad Preferences Manager allows users to select the categories of ads they want to view or choose personalized ads.

Another option is to use Google 's Keep My Opt-Outs extension for the Chrome browser. Google also participated in the Network Advertising Initiative project. Select some or all of the online advertising services from the NAI project and then click Submit to place a cookie on the browser to guide the ad network that does not serve personal ads.

Free add-ons for Firefox and Google Chrome target tracking cookies

A few free extensions will help users identify and block companies that are following you on the web. For example, Ghostery (included in versions for Firefox and Chrome) adds an icon to the browser toolbar, displaying the number of trackers on the current page. Click that icon to see a list of trackers and see options to block or add to the whitelist.

The free Disconnect extension (also available for Facebook and Chrome) performs a more direct method of tracking tracking on the web. Disconnect will block tracking by Google , Facebook , Twitter , Yahoo , and Digg . It also has the option to personalize searches.

The Disconnect extension for Google Chrome and Firefox will block tracking by Google and other popular web services.

Due to Ghostery, Disconnect places an icon on the browser toolbar, displaying the number of blocked items on the current page. Click on that icon to open a window displaying the number of blocked tracks for each service. To unblock tracking for a certain service, click its entry. (Note that we only check Disconnect only with Google; according to Disconnect provider, international Google domains blocking is not yet available).

When checking Disconnect, we have to log into Gmail, Google Docs, and other Google services each time we return or refresh one of these pages. This can be understood that blocking cookies will not let Google keep users in the login state. Otherwise, we cannot use Google services without problems, including searching, viewing and sending Gmail, accessing, creating, posting and downloading Google Docs files.

Although people are concerned about those who are monitoring and recording their web activity properly, at least Google should help users use their services without too much intrusion into personal information. ISPs and other web services also do as much tracking as Google but get very little. In general, the real danger to personal privacy is that our tracker does not know.