Digital Advertising
Nowadays, most websites and online services use some kind of advertising as monetisation. They usually rely on third parties (like Doubleclick, Google, OpenX) to provide the ads and make money when users see or click on them. This is not something bad or new and it has been like that for quite some time. However, to make ads more efficient and improve click rate, advertisers want to identify who's on the other side of the website (the user) to show them more appealing, relevant and personalised ads. This is what happens when you're thinking about buying something (say a new pair of shoes) and look for it on Google, for example. Later when you're on Facebook, Instagram, etc you see an ad for that same pair of shoes you were looking for earlier. It goes without saying that the digital advertising market is quite big.
The trackers
In order to identify you (the user) and figure out what you were googling yesterday and what you're interested in, advertisers deploy trackers. The main objective is to monitor and collect as much information as possible (including browser history) to make it easy to identify the users, how they interact with the website and what they are looking for. Even though there are legitimate reasons to do so, like an e-commerce website, since they collect (and share) information without the user's consent, it's a privacy issue. It's no wonder that Mozilla launched tracking protection for Firefox recently.
How do they work?
There are different kinds of ad trackers spread on the internet:
- Cookies: They are small files stored in the browser that may be used to identify users across different websites, even though there are other uses for them.
- Fingerprinting: A collection of information such as language, browser, operating system version, screen size, fonts and browser history, that when combined creates a fingerprint to easily tell one user from the other. This is a really efficient method and Apple released an update for Safari last year to try to address the issue.
- Web Beacons: Also called web bug, tracking bug and tracking pixel. They are usually in form of small images (1x1 pixel) used to make sure the user has opened an email, website, news article, etc. There was a discussion recently about the use of these trackers as email read receipts.
Although they have differences, their main goal is the same: Gain information from the user.
Problems with trackers
One of the biggest concerns with these trackers is their invisibility: When you go to a website (such as amazon.com) you browser sends a request to amazon, which is expected, but then also sends to a number of third parties without your consent. That means there are companies out there gathering data from you, cross-referencing them with other companies, and building a database with your interests and history, all of that without ever telling you about it. It's true that there are specific laws such as GDPR, in Europe, to protect users from this kind of threat but what we see in reality is that the advertisers haven't stopped and it doesn't seem like they will anytime soon. We believe this is a serious privacy issue, but since giants like Facebook and Google benefit from it 💸, it's hard to imagine they will just stop. Still, after recent events with data breaches like Cambridge Analytica and Experian, just to name a couple of the big ones, the focus on privacy is on the spotlight, and that's a good thing.
How to protect yourself?
As previously mentioned, Firefox 🦊 and Apple 🍏 have both released updates for their browsers with different types of protection against trackers. The thing is, the advertisers didn't stop there: Not only websites, but many apps also employ the use of ad trackers to make money, which means you're not only subject to them inside browsers, they can also track you inside apps. Apple and Firefox have good intentions, but they are not enough.
That was the main drive for Spod VPN & Web Filter, which effectively blocks trackers on your iOS device system-wide, including every browser and app installed. You can also use the 'Alerts' tab inside the app to track the trackers: every time a tracker is blocked an alert is generated. You also have the option of enabling PUSH notifications for whenever we find a tracker trying to gather information from you 🕵️, check it out in the AppStore and enjoy a 30 days free trial.
Final thoughts
Trackers, due to their invisible nature, are not very well known by the average user, but they are deployed by a lot of websites. If you'd like another option to visualize them check out Lightbeam, which is a Firefox add-on with a graphical representation of these trackers. Try one of these solutions and figure out just how many websites and apps you frequently use are employing trackers. Aside from the privacy benefit in blocking them, you also get faster load times since you're device is sending less requests than it used to!
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