Home - How you are being tracked by Peter Blue
Each time you go online you are being tracked, not just by Google, Facebook or LinkedIn, but by a whole load of companies. You can also be searched for via Google and other search engines.
Here is a list of how you can be tracked and what to do about it :-
- IP Address Every machine (PC, Laptop, mobile phone, server, ...) on the Internet is allocated a unique number ( looks like this: 192.168.0.1 ) and that number is traceable to a country, city, building and some cases to a room. Government agencies can, for the most part, trace it to an owner via their ISP (Internet Service Provider). Solutions :-
- TOR (The Onion Router) bounces your Internet traffic all over the planet.
- I2P (The Invisible Internet Project) is a bit like TOR.
- VPN (Virtual Private Network)
- Google Searches (This applies to other search engines too) Google stores your search data for various purposes. Each time you post something on a website or social media, you leave a digital "footprint" that stays visible for a very long time. Sometimes this can hinder things like applying for a job. Solutions :-
- Right to be Forgotten is a concept that has been discussed and put into practice in both the EU and Argentina since 2006. The issue has arisen from desires of individuals to "determine the development of their life in an autonomous way, without being perpetually or periodically stigmatized as a consequence of a specific action performed in the past". Many Internet companies (Google) are unhappy about this (Google loses 'right to be forgotten' case) so it's safe to assume they will find ways around it.
- Use another search Engine that doesn't log all your searches, like this one DuckDuckGo
- Digital Footprint Corruption It may be virtually impossible to delete your digital footprint but quite easy to render it worthless by filling your profiles with fake info.
- Fake 'chaff' accounts In WW2 chaff (small strips of metal foil) were dropped by aircraft to create multiple radar returns. This would confuse the operators by flooding their screens with hundreds radar blips making it impossible to locate them. It's possible to create many profiles with similar names to yours so that anyone trying to do a search is confronted with dozens or hundreds of similar looking profiles. Some people are working on this as you read - link will be posted soon.
- Local Cache Create a local cache of many websites and search those. This would hosted on a server and would be a large project !
- Browser Type (or Browser Agent String) View it here. This can reveal web browser type, operating system and various extensions / plug-ins.
- System Idiosyncrasies (How your machine renders fonts, graphics etc) More on this later ...
Some useful links on the subject :-