We have heard recently that our phones talk secretly and feed our information to thousands of data trackers all day long. While there are ways to keep your phone from talking, it is worth noting that we should never grow complacent when using the Internet.
Even if we secure our data so we are not tracked online, the ad tech industry will find ways to monitor our digital activities.
Advertisers are now getting more and more devious with this new method called fingerprinting, “which security researchers are calling a next-generation tracking technology.”
What is it exactly? Fingerprinting involves looking at the many characteristics of your mobile device or computer, like the screen resolution, operating system and model, and triangulating this information to pinpoint and follow you as you browse the web and use apps. Once enough device characteristics are known, the theory goes, the data can be assembled into a profile that helps identify you the way a fingerprint would.
“Get enough of those attributes together and it creates essentially a bar code,” said Peter Dolanjski, a product lead for Mozilla’s Firefox web browser, who is studying fingerprinting. “That bar code is absolutely uniquely identifiable.”
And here’s the bad news: The technique happens invisibly in the background in apps and websites. That makes it tougher to detect and combat than its predecessor, the web cookie, which was a tracker stored on our devices. The solutions to blocking fingerprinting are also limited.
The Internet has never been this dangerous.
Thankfully, there are some things that you can do to protect yourself from prowling predators of the Web.
Find out how you can protect yourself over at The New York Times.
(Image Credit: ar130405/ Pixabay)
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