8 Privacy & Online Presence
Some companies provide us with free access to things like email, social media, etc. in exchange for showing us advertising. These companies are interested in knowing as much as possible about us (e.g. gender, age, income, etc.) in order to show us advertising that is targeted to our particular demographic. This collection of our personal information can be either seen as intrusive, or as useful (since the ads are more relevant), or somewhere in between. There is information we can purposely put online for others, and then there is information we can inadvertently leave behind when we do things such as search the web. You will want to make a conscious decision as to how to balance your online presence with your privacy. There are a number of factors that impact your online privacy and presence.
Web Browsing Privacy
Browser Cookies
Web browser cookies are a small text file that records information about your visit to a web site. The next time you return to the web site, the browser reads the cookie file. Similar to a fortune cookie, a browser cookie contains a small amount of text or a message. A few facts about cookies:
- Cookies aren’t malicious, they can’t harm your computer like malware potentially could.
- Cookies’ primary purpose is customization of web pages the next time you interact with or return to the site.
- Cookies can’t steal information about you, they only know what you do on the website or what you tell them.
- For example, if on a website you look at a web page selling a particular pair of shoes, a cookie can remember that.
- If the web site asks for you to type your name or a username, it can remember that. Cookies don’t have the ability to look at other files on your computer to try and figure out what your name is, so if the web site knows your name, you must have told the website this information.
- Cookies are only read by the website that created them, so in theory they weren’t designed to share information between websites (website developers found a clever way around this – third party cookies)
First and Third Party Cookies
- First party cookies are created by the website you set out to visit.
- Third party cookies are created when the website you visit temporarily redirects you to a cookie tracking website.
- If you visit another web site that uses the same third party cookie tracking website, then information effectively passes from one web site to the other. This is how, for example an advertisement for the clothing you were looking at buying on one web site shows up in an advertisement on a different website that you look at.
- Third party tracking cookies are considered a privacy issue, and government legislation has made many websites obtain your consent before they use a cookie on a site you visit.
- Third party tracking cookies are on the way out. The Safari and Firefox web browsers started blocking them in 2020, and the Chrome browser will also phase them out by 2022.
Clearing Your Bro