By I’m sure many Internet users would like to know who is tracking their Web activities and when this happens. Unfortunately, there is no such feature in most browsers. Still, there’s a way to find out about your Web activities tracking. The program that you need is Ghostery and it works with Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, Firefox, and Google Chrome.
It’s no news when it comes to the fact that one of the most important revenue sources for Web services comes from the sale of their users’ Web activities. Thus, the data related to when and how these people use the Web services are recorded and hopefully anonymized.
Thus, depending on their Web habits, people will be served ads by ad networks. The bad thing is that many sites don’t always follow their own policies of data-collection. This happened with Facebook as well.
Because of a defect in Facebook’s cookie-management system, the site was recording the Web history of their users even after these signed out. This is when Ghostery comes in handy. So, if you want to know who’s tracking your Web activities, then here’s what you have to do:
1. The first thing to do is to download and install Ghostery.
2. After you do that, you’ll see the ghost icon in the top-right corner. Click on it and then, if you use Chrome, select Options.
3. Now, you’ll have to scroll to Blocking Options and then check the “Enable bug blocking experimental”. After this check all the tracking sites you want to block.
4. The number of trackers on the current page will be shown by the ghostery icon. To see the trackers as well as the links to more information about them, you will just have to click on the ghostery icon.
If you use Chrome, then you will see the information in a scrollable list. In the case of Firefox, the trackers will be listed via a fly-out menu.
5. Ghostery will give you the possibility to relocate the “alert bubble” which appears when the page opens. So, this bubble will list the detected trackers and after a couple of seconds will fade away.
If there are sites that you don’t want to prevent from tracking, you can manually enter them. You will have to enable the GhostRank sharing feature since this one is disabled by default.
Once you enable it, you’ll be able to let the Ghostery’s developer know about the bugs you encounter while browsing.
Even if the program doesn’t guarantee you that your information will not fall into the wrong hands, it will at least allow you to increase your control over your private data.