This post has been modified to reflect new information since its original publication.
It’s 12:00 am, and you’re surfing some favorite websites. You do a little shopping, post in a forum or two, and tweet about your day.
At this point, if you sense someone peering over your shoulder, it will probably be your spouse looking for a midnight snack.
You’re probably not thinking about electronic privacy and the personal information your computer leaves behind as it weaves from site to site. However, without filling in a single form, your struggle to pick between two laptops on one website is traced straight through to the final site where you purchase something else entirely.
It’s easy to think of yourself as a small speck of sand in an invisible web of servers. But, to protect your online reputation, it’s important to understand the traces your computer leaves on each website you visit.
By the end of this article, you’ll know how companies collect your private information, and how you can protect your digital privacy. You will also discover what sort of information websites obtain about you, how they obtain it, and ultimately what they do with that data.
Protect your internet privacy while surfing the web
Websites can collect an extensive personal profile on you within mere seconds of your clicking on a site. Information such as your location, specific address, name, email address, and even phone number is obtainable.
In addition, website owners can discover your specific shopping habits, what keywords you used to find their site, and whether you were interested in advertisements on their pages.
Marketers can reverse engineer most of this information through IP addresses, web browser cookies, and tiny image files called web beacons or tracking pixels.
In much the same way that companies gauge the strength of their personal branding by monitoring how you watch television, the way you travel through the web is analyzed and tabulated into statistical data. This data allows businesses large and small to develop new products, discover the shopping habits of their target markets, and make important marketing decisions.
On one hand, without access to this information, you would find companies struggling to properly determine the interests of their mainstream online audiences.
On the other hand, having your web browsing monitored can make you feel as though your personal privacy is being invaded.
That’s one of the reasons why we have privacy options now when we browse online. Thanks to the implementation of online privacy regulations like the US’s California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and the EU’s Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), websites must disclose whether they collect or track your data and give you the chance to opt out of having your data gathered.
Let’s expand on this, by doing a deep dive on cookies and sessions.
Monitor the information your computer sends out
When a user clicks on a website, a “session” begins.
A session tracks you from the first page you click on until you exit the site, using IP addresses, cookies, tracking pixels, and other technologies.
Web browser cookies, in particular, can provide a fairly complete profile of a user’s preferences. There are three main types:
- Session cookie: This cookie expires once you close the website. These are usually used for tasks like making sure you get logged out automatically between sessions.
- Persistent cookie: This type remains on your hard drive for more than one session. It either expires at a set time or remains until you delete it manually.
Persistent or permanent cookies can collect information about you and your web browsing habits, adding to the store of information on each visit.
- Third-party, ad-serving cookie: The last type of cookie monitors your web browsing to show you advertisements that relate to your interests.
The good news and bad news
The good news is 3rd-party cookies will be phased out by Google Chrome in the second half of 2024.
The bad news is there are zombie cookies now (a mutation of third-party cookies), and they’re even harder to delete than the old 3rd-party cookies are.
That’s because zombie cookies hide in backup storage locations on your computer and take advantage of your system’s vulnerabilities.
Just like old third-party cookies, they track your usage, collect data, and invade your privacy.
So, managing your privacy is still priority number one when you’re online.
Not all internet cookies are created equally
In general, cookies are restricted to a single domain.
For example, if the site www.amazingcookies.com leaves a persistent cookie in your browser, the site www.allamericancookies.com will not be able to access it.
However, third-party tracking cookies cleverly work around this limitation.
When a site owner places third-party ads on the site, the actual ads are hosted by another third-party site.
You don’t visit it directly, but a piece of code on the website loads the third-party cookie into your browser. If your computer accepts these third-party cookies, then every site that uses the same ad service will be able to access your information.
This can include detail-rich profiles with your IP address, location, shopping preferences, and, in some cases, your payment information.
Even if you disable third-party cookies, you can still be tracked using the tracking-pixel technique described above.
Facebook, for instance, offers tracking pixels to its advertisers so that people who visit the advertiser’s website are targeted by certain ads on Facebook.
Control your personal information online and offline
There are steps you can use to minimize the amount of personal information marketers and others collect about you online.
The following are a few initial tips:
- Disable third-party cookies in your browser.
- Install a tracking-pixel blocking app.
- Opt out of people-search sites.
- Use an ad blocker.
It can be scary finding out how vulnerable your privacy really is. That’s why we offer a free tool that helps you see what is lurking on the internet about you.
If you are curious about what’s been collected about you online and what people can find about you, download our free reputation report card.
It’s a resource that can be worth its weight in gold and will instantly show you your online reputation score and what dangerous personal data comes up when someone searches the internet for your name or business.