This is not about a crazy nut conspiracy theory. It’s about how your internet surfing activities are kept track of. Many of you know about “cookies”, small files that your internet browser saves in your computer as it visits websites, and that they can be used to keep track of what websites you visit.

A less known fact is that websites include code in them that keeps track and report specifics of all visitors. Then there’s companies that specialize in collecting, analyzing and selling such information, which your browser normally gives away when visiting a site.  Things like date and time of your visit, your computer’s operating system, your IP (Internet Protocol) address (which can pinpoint your geographical location within a few miles radio), your internet service provider, what link took you to the particular website you’re visiting, which browser and what version of it you’re using, even your screen resolution!

The biggest company in this activity of web tracking is, by far (no surprise), Google with Google Analytics. Many other smaller companies also engage in this type of “surveillance”.

What can you do? For the Firefox browser users, there is a free add-on called Ghostery, which you can get here: http://www.ghostery.com/ . What does it do? it alerts you if there are trackers in the website you are visiting and gives you the option to block them. There is also a way to pull a big list of known trackers and with one click choose to block them all, so you don’t have to continuously click to block individual trackers as you visit websites.

I thought you should know about this and what can be done about it.