Looking up symptoms on line? These companies ... - CLL Support

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Looking up symptoms on line? These companies are tracking you.

AussieNeil profile image
AussieNeilPartnerAdministrator
4 Replies

"It’s 2015—when we feel sick, fear disease, or have questions about our health, we turn first to the internet. According to the Pew Internet Project, 72 percent of US internet users look up health-related information online. But an astonishing number of the pages we visit to learn about private health concerns—confidentially, we assume—are tracking our queries, sending the sensitive data to third party corporations, even shipping the information directly to the same brokers who monitor our credit scores. It’s happening for profit, for an “improved user experience,” and because developers have flocked to “free” plugins and tools provided by data-vacuuming companies.

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WebMD, for instance, is the 106th most-visited site in the US, according to Alexa, and figures prominently in search results for most commonly searched diseases. It sends third party requests to a whopping 34 separate domains, including the data brokers Experian and Acxiom.

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Even trusted, nonprofit public websites are tracking you—the Mayo Clinic and Planned Parenthood, for example, each send your data to third parties like Google and Ensighten. This isn’t because either is intending to do anything nefarious; it’s just because they’ve installed convenient free software—but it is nonetheless sending data about the health issues you’re looking at to corporations."

Full article by Brian Merchant:

motherboard.vice.com/read/l...

Basis for Brian's article:

Pew Internet Research Centre assessment of Americans' use of internet technology for health purposes. Worth reading:

pewinternet.org/fact-sheets...

While reading Brian's article is rather alarmist, is there anything you can do to reduce this invasion into a particularly private part of our lives?

From Brian's article "Quintin says that there are things users can do to protect themselves from such tracking right now—install ad blockers like the Privacy Badger eff.org/privacybadger ."

The Firefox browser has add-ons like Adblock Edge or Adblock Plus, which work transparently and block ads that otherwise appear on your web pages and can track your browsing. If you are really keen, you can use NoScript, another Firefox add-on, which significantly improves your security, but it does take some investment to set up the first time you visit a new web page, as you have to work out what scripts your browser needs to run to render the web page so that you can view it and not enable scripts from sites that are linked in, but not required for you to view the page. There's also Ghostery, which "looks for third-party page elements (or "trackers") on the web pages you visit. These can be things like social network widgets, advertisements, invisible pixels used for tracking and analytics, and so on. Ghostery notifies you that these things are present, and which companies operate them. You can learn more about these companies, and if you wish, choose to block the trackers they operate." Ghostery and NoScript are highly recommended by those that particularly value their privacy. These add-ons or similar are available for other browsers that support add-ons.

Plus of course, there are plenty of tips in our community's security posts, which you can access through Online Security Starts with YOU!

healthunlocked.com/cllsuppo...

One wag suggested we use this tracking to advantage by search(ing) for: "I feel too healthy" or "Why do I never get sick?"

Neil

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Cllcanada profile image
CllcanadaTop Poster CURE Hero

And now there are 'Super Cookies'... at least in theory...

pcworld.com/article/2865297...

SeymourB profile image
SeymourB in reply toCllcanada

It looks like there's several definitions for the term "super cookie":

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_...

The pcworld article is refering to yet another one. I imagine that any new cookie technology is initially called "super".

Also note that web sites can track you without cookies - using server-side tracking. You have no choice nor any knowledge in that case. Google "server-side tracking" to learn more than you wanted to know.

Server-side tracking is more expensive for the web site, and cannot track some kinds of web behavior as well - videos from a different site displayed inside a web page, for example.

SeymourB profile image
SeymourB

I have been using Ghostery to block many kinds of tracking methods for several weeks now.

It puts an icon on the browser menu or address bar that you can click to enable or disable whatever it finds. Then, when a new web page loads, a purple box appears on the lower right showing what trackers were blocked.

A visit to a Reuters news site (I'm not picking on them in particular) showed 46 different tracking services, including the usual Facebook and Twitter trackers. FoxNews had 41. CNN had 33.

You can use Ghostery in 2 ways:

1. Disable all trackers, and see which web sites break - enabling trackers on a broken web site 1 by 1, and reloading to see if it now works. There are thousands of trackers in Ghostery's database. You can also quickly pause Ghostery blocking entirely if it's a site you absolutely need to get to in a hurry.

2. Disable trackers 1 by 1 as you hit a web page - that's what I do. Once you block a tracker for one website, it's also blocked on other sites.

The only real problem that I've run into is that some sites require Adobe Typekit to work properly, so I don't block that.

There are versions of Ghostery for IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera, as well as iOS, Android, and Kindle:

ghostery.com/en/download

The version for IE doesn't seem to be a smooth as Chrome or Firefox. I do recommend exiting the browser completely after doing the intro wizard.

Using it also perceptably speeds up loading some pages.

Ghostery for Android appears to be a self contained browser app - or maybe a new "user interface" for the existing Android browser. But it appears as a separate browser app.

I don't have an iPhone to test.

=seymour=

Cllcanada profile image
CllcanadaTop Poster CURE Hero

Ghostery is interesting, I have used it on and off since 2012... it is very tied to DuckDuckGo..the last few versions on iPad have been unstable...recent update on iOS8 is better...

The very shiny feature is the use on community WIFI, it allows you to block all trackers, from all other applications or other connections sharing a WIFI connection...

I tried a recent version and set HTTP PROXY to the cloud and it crashed my iPad WIFI. :-(

It isn't ready for prime time yet on iOS, but bug fixes are coming fast...

~chris

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