This website shows you exactly what sites know about you
by Séamus Bellamy · Boing BoingThere are a lot of things you can do to make it harder to trace who you are online. But, like the criminal in a shitty prime-time cop show, we always leave behind a little something of ourselves. It's the price we pay for a free and open internet — where "free" means no subscription, and "open" means corporations rip your life open like a bag of chips to glean everything they can about you.
You've heard about cookies and know your IP address can track your location. But even if you reject every cookie and hide behind a VPN, there's a flood of other information harvested from your device every visit. If you want to know what gets fished out of your online life — or feel you haven't been creeped out quite enough this week — let me suggest a website that can help with both.
SinceYouArrived has a single purpose: to show you all the information that a webmaster, and their corporate masters, can get their rathooks on just by clicking a link. As soon as a page opens in your browser, the harvesting begins — your location (or VPN node), the time you logged on, the language you speak, your device, time spent on the page, how much you've read, and, depending on your browser, even which phone or laptop you're using. The site explains how it works and the implications of letting website owners do it. There's plenty more that owner Matt TK could have learned from your visit — things a little too intrusive to be ethical (but tons of companies do anyway). Read further down, and you'll learn more than you likely want to know about how we're stalked online by companies and media we're supposed to trust.
There are steps you can take to protect your data. A great first is a visit to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to read their internet security primer.
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