Your online habits – what they know about you


Last month I published two articles about online privacy and how your activities are tracked. The Wall Street Journal has now published another article in its ongoing series ‘What They Know’, examining how Web sites are tracking your every activity. They provide this very useful video introduction.

The WSJ also provides a very interesting interactive graphic, examining the extent to which the 50 most popular US Web sites track your movements. Here, for example, is how Dictionary.com is depicted. It’s the worst offender, with no fewer than 11 first-party and 223 third-party tracking software applications trying to follow you as you enter and leave the site.

You can check the other 49 top sites, and find out how many software trackers they unleash on you, at the WSJ’s Web page. Very interesting and disturbing viewing – and highly recommended.

Peter

2 comments

  1. What the WSJ article does not tell you is just how many tracking mechanisms it uses to tracks users.

    A quick analysis of their site renewed my decison to let my WSJ login expire from natural causes.

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