Online trackers: how they affect your privacy and what they know about you
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Our data, our information on the web have great value today. There are many marketing companies that can find a way to collect information about our navigation. There are also many methods that hackers can use to obtain this data and be able to sell it to third parties. In this article we are going to talk about online trackers. We will explain how they affect our privacy and what they know about users.
Privacy is a
fundamental factor in the network
Keep in mind
that maintaining privacy when browsing the Internet is essential. We must
always take care of our personal information if we do not want problems that
could put our data at risk and, ultimately, also affect security.
Luckily we
have tools at our disposal that help us protect our systems. We
can use programs that help our day to day and thus prevent possible intruders
from entering our accounts or obtaining personal information.
However,
there are also many methods that you can use on the web to track us. We already
know that our information has great value on the web. Many marketing companies
can put us in spam campaigns, send targeted advertising, or even sell that data
to third parties.
One of these ways they have to invade our privacy are the so-called online trackers. We are going to explain what they are and how they can affect us.
What are online trackers and what do
they know about us?
The online
trackers use different methods and can be varied. An example are those that are
browser-based. They can use what is known as a fingerprint. In this way, they
track our web browsing, they can collect data on which sites we visit, what
screen resolution we are using, the type of monitor, which sections of a
website we have visited, etc. Data that, in short, can help to obtain more
information from us.
All this
information is used to create user profiles. In this way they can target
advertising or include that user in a specific marketing campaign based on the
information they have been able to collect.
One of the
most used methods to track users is cookies. What they do is store user
information. They obtain data related to our name, location, email or any other
identifier that you may have collected.
Ultimately,
online trackers can collect a large amount of information from users. For this
they can use different methods depending on the resources available to them. In
this way they can create a user profile and be able to differentiate them.
Multiple
trackers
Keep in mind
that there is no single tracker or type of trackers. There can be a large
number that are designed to obtain different types of information and data.
Each tracker could have a function to collect data when browsing the Internet.
Each of
these trackers subsequently sends the collected data to a central tracker. That
central tracker is the one in charge of managing all the information that they
have been collecting.
Why do trackers affect our privacy?
As we have
mentioned in this article, online trackers can collect a large amount of data.
This means that they will know different aspects of the users and will create a
profile that can include us in a database of Spam campaigns, for example.
We also talk
about data that can be sensitive, such as our ID, residence, etc. They can end
up in the wrong hands and seriously compromise our privacy and security. That
is why these online trackers can become a real problem.
With this
data that they collect from us, they could even impersonate our identity. It
is, therefore, a major problem. This causes many users to use specific tools to
privately browse the network, such as using VPN services or using privacy-based
browsers, such as Tor.
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