Use Privacy Badger

Privacy Badger is a browser extension by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, that prevents sites from tracking your visits across the web. It’s available for Chrome (the most popular browser among our visitors and customers), Firefox (second) and Opera (nowhere to be found).

This mostly concerns advertisers that use embedded imagery or javascript segments, and set cookies that allow them to identify you as a “unique” visitor. Tracking you across the web gives the advertiser an opportunity to profile your use of the Internet — what newspaper sites you read, which articles interest you, etc. A standard was adopted that is “Do Not Track”, but it’s effectiveness is limited since honoring the HTTP header is discretionary — ever met a courteous advertiser?

While that’s fun while you are anonymous and not logged in to any social media site (for example, through Private Browsing tabs), it’s easy enough to await your “unique visitor cookie” to be aligned with one or more (social media) user names. Especially Twitter and Facebook and Google+ buttons on all sorts of articles can determine and use this information very easily — remember, they live off of analysis of vast amounts of data.

Install it now, and enjoy!