Privacy is one of your main concerns in your life to be more secure and safe. Security is a need of our lives and privacy comes under security. It may applies to many activities that you are depend on. As you are online, surfing web is a regular activity you almost do everyday. You click on an interesting link on the web and navigate to a page you may never been to. Most of sites are using one or more tracking mechanisms to track you and your behavior. It's not an unusual in the sense of tracking visitors. But what if the information stored could helps in abusing your privacy?
Online Privacy
Web analytic services collect basic web browser configuration to correctly measure web traffic and prevent click frauds. But with the help of client side scripting languages, they can collect further information not only about your web browser but also about your computer configuration. Grasping those information comprises a 'Device Fingerprint', which can define as the compact summary of your software and hardware settings collected from a remote computing device.
Collecting those information could help in identifying you uniquely and to prevent identity theft and credit card frauds. But the sites you are visiting may have 3rd party advertisements which build unique profiles about visitors to know more about their interests and used to detect those visitors again on elsewhere on the web to show advertisements according their stored interests whenever they surf web. This could be a simple mechanism used by advertisers but what if they sold your information to another party or potentially show up in unwanted places?
Not only advertisements, but also search engines tracks your keywords while implying privacy policies regarding the information being collected. But those information still can be requested legally by organizations to find you, they could be on unethical employees' hands who could misuse or the organizations which hold those information could be get hacked.
Prevent Collecting Information
If you care more about your privacy (or else you should aware of it) rather than giving away your information for other parties that you don't trust, it could be better if you can use some of below web browser applications to detect invisible site trackers and opt out from those tracking or targeted advertisements on the sites you don't trust to maximize your protection. You can use these extensions just to prevent tracking and to be safe online. You can allow services you may wants to allow. For example, as Facebook like button tracks information, it will be blocked. So you can allow it if you need to. Remember, the settings only applies for you and you can't do permanent changes for tracking services or advertisements on external sites. All of below extensions or applications may not compatible with all of web browsers.
1. Ghostry - Detect invisible site trackers, helps you learn more about trackers and let you control visibility of your online behavior.
2. Abine - Helps you find and block site trackers, Opts-out from receiving targeted advertisements
3. AdBlock Plus - Address the problem of annoying and intrusive online advertisements
4. AdBlock - Let you block advertisements on web pages
5. NoScript - Script blocking add-on which allows JavaScript, Java, Flash and other plugins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice.
6. NotScript - Gives you greater control over JavaScript, Java, Flash and other plugins to increase security
7. Beef Taco - Let you Opt-out from targeted advertisements
8. Disconnect - Stop major search engines and 3rd party advertisements from tracking you on web pages
9. Tor - Prevent anyone from detecting your identity or online behavior
10. HTTPS Everywhere - Encrypts your communications with number of major websites. But this may prevent some elements on a web page which not optimized to work over HTTPS connections.
Enjoy :-)