Did you know that websites can track your browsing activity? Most of us probably do. After all, how else would an advertisement for an item for which you recently searched in your browser suddenly appear? That’s from the tracking. Most browsers do this, but a study by some researchers in Germany found that your browsing activity can be tracked for a lot longer than browser designers anticipated. What does this mean? It means that if you visit a website, the owner of that website can follow your browsing from site to site, if it is at all associated to another that tracks browsing, for a long time…over a week in some cases and perhaps longer if there is a long chain of browsing.
Ok, this sounds kind of complex and it is for most of us. However, in a very simple form, if you visit an online shopping site and it’s linked to another company, such as Google, they keep your tracking history “open.” Then that company is working with another, then they are tracking you too. It’s like that commercial from years ago, you tell two friends, then they tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and on and on. This is the case whether you are browsing anonymously or not in most browsers. That’s a very simple explanation for the findings of this research.
Why is this a problem? Well, it’s following you and it’s a matter of your privacy.
To be clear on this, to the knowledge of the researchers, or anyone else that’s come forward, no one is abusing this, but the possibility is there. Out of the 45 browsers, both for desktop and mobile devices, only three of them didn’t allow the browsers to track activity at all. That was Tor, JonDoBrowser, and Orbot. Four others were defaulted to block some tracking via third parties, but they did allow for long-term tracking via this culprit: The Transport Layer Secuirty (TLS) option.
Your options? You can change to one of the browsers that just don’t track your browsing. But not all browsers will work with all websites. So even if you can use one of those most of the time, every once in a while, you’ll probably have to switch back when a website isn’t working properly. In that case, if you don’t want to be tracked, try using the anonymous option on that browser. And even then, if you still really don’t want to be tracked, just don’t go to that site.
If you keep the current browser and it isn’t one of those three, be sure to disallow third party tracking cookies for sure. It won’t resolve this issue, but it will help. You will need to check the settings for the product you use.
The vast majority of the browsers tested in the study actually cleared the browser TLS sessions within an hour. And the retailers or website owners likely don’t (or didn’t before this) even know that longer tracking is possible. However, now that the word is out, browser makers should be making efforts to change this for privacy concerns. Whether or not they are is still to be determined.