Tracking My Digital Trackers

   Google / Privacy / Tracking      Posted on March 1, 2012 by Amy

Privacy online has been all over the news lately. It’s everywhere you turn, from Google’s new privacy policy, and potential investigation and how to delete your history before it goes into effect, to articles like this one from the Atlantic that describe who, how, and why companies are tracking online activities.

But how do you know who’s tracking you? And why? Mozilla’s Firefox browser has a plugin for that, called Collusion. The Altantic piece describes the add-on and Life Hacker also published an article on it.

So I decided to see for myself. I went to three sites:
• Publisher: CNN
• Ecommerce: Amazon
• Social media: Facebook

Immediately, Collusion revealed nearly 2 dozen companies that were tracking me. There were household names like Goolge, Facebook, Turner and Facebook. And some ad industry firms like Pulse 360, Insight Express, Atlas, Audience Science and Mediaplex.

Collusion differentiates between those services that track you across multiple sites (red dots) and those it’s not sure about (grey dots). It also enables you to see what information they have access to and can help you understand how well any efforts you’ve used to prevent this kind of tracking are working.

If you’re interested in seeing for yourself, give Collision a try.