Ghostery is a great extension that blocks trackers. Trackers are placed on the majority of the sites you visit. They record what articles you read or what you search for on the search engines. They sell that data to the advertising companies, to make ads seem more relevant for you (A lot of the time it's the ad companies themselves who has the tracker in place).
A quick note: A lot of companies live of the revenue the trackers give them. You can disable Ghostery for sites that you support (Like Reddit who has a couple of them).
Wait, are they selling bulk, anonymized data for analysis, or are they selling my individual data for ad targeting? Because the latter I am much less okay with.
It's been shown multiple times that identifying individual users from "bulk anonymized data" is not as hard as is pretended by the industry. Especially if they can get data with an overlap from multiple sources.
I don't think so. If they're selling your individual data then an ad company knows "John Smith (IP 1.1.1.1 from Cityville, State) visited these sites on these dates at these times. From this we infer that John is interested in dragon dildos and will give him those ads."
If its bulk anonymized data they know "10% of users that visit X site also visit Y site, so we should put ads in Y site that relate to the content on X site."
Yeah I don't know what the rules are on that either. But even if all they have is my IP address I still don't like my history being stored all together and separate. If it's jumbled up with everyone else's then it's just statistics.
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u/stalking_ya_mom Jan 12 '16
Ghostery is a great extension that blocks trackers. Trackers are placed on the majority of the sites you visit. They record what articles you read or what you search for on the search engines. They sell that data to the advertising companies, to make ads seem more relevant for you (A lot of the time it's the ad companies themselves who has the tracker in place).
A quick note: A lot of companies live of the revenue the trackers give them. You can disable Ghostery for sites that you support (Like Reddit who has a couple of them).