Online trackers

May 17, 2017
With everything going on on the web, specially all the tracking of websites. I thought I take a look at this. I wanted to get an idea of what else is tracking your every move. Ads are bad enough but now it seems that every page wants to track you online which is just terrible. I have seen even some ads on some companies websites as well which makes me wonder if they even know that they have those on there.
Apart from the fact that you could get more than just ads through advertisements, these things will eventually slow things down.

Here's one perfect example. This is the local tv station in Los Angeles with not one, two three or even ten trackers, but 91! If you didn't know why their website is also very slow, now at least you have one good example. Even I'm dumbfounded by the 91 trackers/ads that they have on their website.

 

Here's the LA Times website with 35 trackers on their homepage.

 

Here's a page you may have use lately.  Here's autozone with their 21 trackers. I have even seen some google ads at the bottom of their site.

Here's pepboys coming in at 41 trackers. 

Although this is just a very small sample of what websites do, it's something that we need to be very aware of. If you use facebook for example you may have looked at something and the next ad that popped up was about something you were looking at. Well, these work in a similar way. 

I guess the one that really reminded me to bring this up was my own android phone. One night turned off the wifi, but for some reason I woke up in the middle of the night and looked at it. Guess what, the wifi was back on. Those apps that you download on your phone, they tend to give themselves a lot of access to your phone as well. Meaning they can look at your text messages, emails, etc. In short, your privacy is being invaded more and more, but people just let apps go all willy nilly about their business. I guess the point I want to make here is that you should be aware of these things. It's okay to use some apps for example, but make sure you turn them off if you don't need them. As for the online tracking, well there are many ad blockers, just make sure what you get is something that works. I just hope this helps a bit since even large companies can have all this junk in there which is just not cool. I understand that there is always a need for some advertisements, but I think a lot of this has been taken way too far on websites as you can see.