The ad for those shoes we saw online that follows us everywhere we browse, Booking who sends us an email a day to ask us if we are still interested in the trip we thought we were going to do, Facebook and Instagram showing us adverts on the jacket we had placed in the shopping cart on Zalando or on the book we were about to buy on Amazon. Or maybe on the watch we just talked to someone about.
There have always been banners online, but for some years they have become more intrusive, or, as the companies claim, “customized to your needs and tastes”. But this means allowing sites and apps to know our needs and tastes.
Is it possible to defend oneself? Yes, as the new privacy policy adopted on iPhones. Is it easy to defend yourself? Not so much, and you have to take into account a slightly more complicated online life, because giving up a more or less large part of our privacy is the price to pay for free services that allow you to share and store photos online, be located and guided by a part of an unknown city, buy anything and have it shipped home, read news from all over the world for free and so on. IS if we don’t want to pay this price anymore, many of these things we will not be able to have anymore.
Chat, contacts, photos and videos: how to backup an Android smartphone and live happily
by Emanuele Capone
How do companies know everything
Before understanding how to defend ourselves, it is important to understand how companies know what we like. The giants of the Net, from search engines to social networks, from ecommerce sites to newspaper sites, to apps, they monitor what we do online and in the real world, in more or less transparent ways, they collect information about us and pass it on to companies.
Online, they mostly do it in 3 ways:
- con i cookie, tiny text files that keep track of our preferences for a particular site (including passwords), and may also contain our entire browsing history;
- with function login with …: when we access a site using our Facebook or Google account, that site obtains information about our email, our position in the world, our friends and contacts on social networks;
- with the Facebook Pixel, a string of code inserted in the pages of many sites, which allows the Zuckerberg social network to keep track of everything we do online, even by following us from one site to another.
In the real world, especially through:
- the detection of our position thanks to the GPS of the smartphone, which allows us to know where we live, how we move between home and work, which shops we have close to and which ones we often pass by;
- the friends list, which allows Facebook to know which people we interact with most often, probably even live, and to hypothesize that if one of our contacts is a fan of a TV series, he may have talked about it with us (it is one of the reasons why we see banners of things we have never searched for online).
Banners and online advertising, 10 ways to defend privacy
Step by step, here’s what to install, what to deactivate (and activate) to be more protected while browsing, from your computer and smartphone
The 10 steps to take to try to defend yourself
As far as personalized banners are concerned, it is essential the Google Ads Settings page, which you can connect to after logging in to find out everything Big G knows about us. After entering, we can:
- disable personalization entirely ads (it is active by default), preventing Google from profiling us based on our searches;
- or act on every single item of the list to activate or deactivate the advertisements on that specific topic (just click on Clothing and then on Deactivate to prevent tracking of our searches in that area).
Since Google’s profiling activity is just one of the many to which we are subjected online and offline, more is needed:
- periodically delete cookies (you do so on Chrome, so su Edge e so on Safari), remembering that there is a risk of deleting the access data and passwords of sites that we consult daily;
- periodically clear the history browser navigation and also our activity on search engines (the one done on Google is on the My Activity page);
- limit as much as possible the use of login with …, creating a specific password for each site that asks to authenticate us or at least check what information is given using it, even deselecting the superfluous ones;
- install an extension that allows know if the site we are browsing hides any Facebook Pixel (that for Chrome is here), so as to be able to decide how to act on that site, where to click and where not or even whether to visit it with the “Incognito” mode, available on the most popular browsers;
- install a ad blocker, i.e. a software that blocks the display of banners, bearing in mind that in many cases this will make it impossible to navigate the site;
- install a browser more attentive to privacy, come DuckDuck Go O Firefox Focus, which integrate anti-tracking functions, to be used when you want more discretion (not every day, because the browsing experience is not exactly pleasant);
- disable the receiving personalized advertisements and the profiling activity that allows them, on Apple devices, its Facebook, Google and also su Twitter.
The last precautions to be taken, halfway between real and virtual world, between offline and online, there are mainly two:
- disable the GPS of the smartphone through the settings dedicated to Geolocation, possibly reactivating it in case of need, remembering that without detection of the position we will not be able to know in which direction the station is, which restaurants we have next to, where the nearest pharmacy is or how far we are from the person with whom we have an appointment;
- use common sense, which seems obvious but is not so obvious, and proceed online with the same precautions with which we act offline, whether it is entering credit card data on unknown sites or accepting conditions of use that require you to sell all information about us.
In short, let’s behave with technology as we do with humans: our trust must be earned, not granted to the first (program) that passes.
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