Today, many sites use external services like Google Analytics, Google AdSense, WordPress Stats or a plethora of others for statistics or the analysis of user behaviors. Also, each facebook or twitter button shown on a web page leads to a subsequent entry on facebook’s or twitter’s log with your ip, time of access and – if logged in – user credentials.
As a result, you become traceable, fully traceable. Anyone having access to such logs can now recreate and evaluate your complete browsing history over time. As a result, creating your personal user profile becomes a piece of cake. Knowing what you like is a given. Knowing what you may buy in the future is known. Knowing who your friends are can be determined.
Scary?
For me, yes. I don’t want others to collect such an amount of information about me and my personal behavior. Information, which will be there indefinitely and which I have no right and no possibility to delete.
Enter Ghostery
Ghostery is a nifty Firefox Add-on which shows you a list of known external services like the Facebook button mentioned above which a website uses and which is used for logging your own personal behavior. Each of these, let’s call them trackers can be blocked making you a bit more anonymous within the interwebs.
PS: And I guarantee you will be surprised about the number of logging services each website uses.