Google Privacy Blocks Websites From Tracking You

Privacy has moved into the public focus in recent years. Initiatives like Mozilla’s Do Not Track Header try to improve user privacy on the Internet.

Google Privacy is a Firefox add-on that tries to enforce do not track on popular websites. The name may suggest that the add-on has been created by Google but that is not the case. It is likely that it concentrated on Google in the beginning, and that support for other websites have been added later on in development.

Google Privacy currently supports Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, Facebook and Ask. The basic idea behind the add-on is to modify links on those websites to remove tracking functionality from them. It should be noted at this point that the sites still have options to track users through other means, for instance with JavaScript running on the site or analysis of web traffic.

First thing you may want to do after installing the add-on and restarting the browser is to look at the options it provides.

General options are displayed on the left and site specific options on the right. The extension by default displays small icons next to each link that indicates whether the link is a tracking link or not. Green icons indicate links that respect the privacy, while red icons indicate those that do not.

Both the original link and its modified version can be displayed at the same time. It is alternatively possible to hide tracking links automatically so that only safe links are displayed on the supported sites.

The websites listing can be used to enable or disable tracking on links that point to the same website, and to block the tracking of every click on links on the web page instead. The latter could have an impact on the site’s functionality though.

If you are concerned about your privacy online, you might want to take Google Privacy for Firefox for a test drive.

The add-ons concentration on six major companies limits its reach significantly. It is therefor recommended to install additional extensions to make up for that limitation. RequestPolicy is a good start, or the excellent NoScript add-on.

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Disable Major Third Party Tracking Services With Disconnect For Chrome About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Tuesday February 28, 2012 -
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Two WordPress Tracking Plugins That Measure Popularity

As a WordPress webmaster, or webmaster in general, you are likely interested in how well your articles are doing. This can provide you with excellent insight into what the website’s readership favors, and what they do not like at all. While you could install third party tracking software for that, or use your web servers or web hosting companies first party tracking apps, you’d need some experiencing in analyzing the statistics correctly to make sense out of them. Plus, you need to open a third party site to look at the stats.

WordPress tracking plugins can provide you with the information directly in the admin dashboard, which some webmasters and admins may prefer. Today, I’d like to review two tracking plugins that I’m currently using on some of the WordPress blogs that I own.

Author Page Views Plugin

This plugin is especially handy for multi-author blogs, as it displays the pageviews that each of the blog’s authors generate. The plugin lists all blog authors, their emails, and their current view count in the admin dashboard.

The reports are configured to display page views for the last 30 days, with options at the top to change the date range. That’s useful if authors get paid by impressions, or if they are paid a bonus if they generate a lot of impressions.

The pageviews, sorted by month, are also listed on each author’s user account page. Here it is furthermore possible to add a rate per thousand pageviews if the authors are paid (extra) per pageview.

The plugin works fine with caching plugins. It has been tested on blogs running W3 Total Cache and Super Cache, and should work with other caching plugins as well.

I personally like the plugin as it provides me with insight how individual authors are performing on the site. You could also use it to compare the performance of authors, to find out what popular authors are doing differently to increase the page view count of less popular authors on the site.

The Author Page Views plugin is available at the official WordPress Plugin Directory.

Post Views

This WordPress plugin keeps track of the visits each post and page on the blog gets. For each post, it displays the number of hits of the day, week, month, half-year, year and total, as well as the last viewed time.

Sorting options and filters are available to look at posts of a specific date or category, and to change the order in which they are presented in the interface.

The plugin furthermore provides information about the the ratio of viewed sites to non-viewed sites for all time spans, and a ranking list that lists the top 20 posts of the blog.

These information can be useful to find out what the blog’s readership likes, and what they do not like or are not interested in.

Post Views is also available at the Plugin Directory.

Both plugins can help you better understand your site’s audience. I would not necessarily install them on a high traffic site like Ghacks though, as they might put a lot of strain on the server otherwise. For small to medium sized sites, it is definitely an option to analyze the traffic the site receives.

Are you using similar WordPress plugins? Let me know in the comments.

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Google To Start Tracking Users Across Services

An announcement was posted yesterday on the official Google blog that indicates that changes are being made to Google’s privacy policies and terms of service. What first looks like a reasonable thing to do is in fact something that will keep privacy advocates up at night. Google will merge their privacy policies, of which about 60 are now available, into one main privacy policy. This on first glance is good from a user perspective, as it improves the privacy policy’s accessibility.

Google furthermore has created a main Google Terms of Service file that covers many of their products. This too improves accessibility.

The following paragraphs outlines how Google thinks users will profit from the change

What does this mean in practice? The main change is for users with Google Accounts. Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.

Our recently launched personal search feature is a good example of the cool things Google can do when we combine information across products. Our search box now gives you great answers not just from the web, but your personal stuff too. So if I search for restaurants in Munich, I might see Google+ posts or photos that people have shared with me, or that are in my albums. Today we can also do things like make it easy for you to read a memo from Google Docs right in your Gmail, or add someone from your Gmail contacts to a meeting in Google Calendar.

But there’s so much more that Google can do to help you by sharing more of your information with … well, you. We can make search better—figuring out what you really mean when you type in Apple, Jaguar or Pink. We can provide more relevant ads too. For example, it’s January, but maybe you’re not a gym person, so fitness ads aren’t that useful to you. We can provide reminders that you’re going to be late for a meeting based on your location, your calendar and an understanding of what the traffic is like that day. Or ensure that our spelling suggestions, even for your friends’ names, are accurate because you’ve typed them before. People still have to do way too much heavy lifting, and we want to do a better job of helping them out.

The first thing that you will notice is that Google will share activity information between services come March 1 when the new policies go live. This has an impact on two areas:

Personalization: Up until now only a handful services shared information with each other, Google+ data was for instance used for a personalized search experience. Now all data may be used for that experience.Advertisement: The more Google knows about you, the higher paying ads they can get to be displayed to you.

We already know that Google is reading your emails to serve ads on Gmail. Gmail users who are using other Google services may now see tailored ads pop up on other services as well, or YouTube videos recommended to them based on the emails they read.

It could also link things they do on their phone to searches they make on a desktop PC, or display ads for a popular coffee chain on their phone if Google has picked up that you like to drink coffee in the morning and notice that you are currently on the go with your phone.

Google could use location based information it collects from the Android phone to display ads to you on all other Google services that share the new privacy policy. You went to a clothing store for big people? Then you may see “lose weight” videos on YouTube, or ads on Google search.

Like to visit sex clubs? How about ads for related items on your desktop?

As Owen Williams points out over at Neowin, this could also have business and job related consequences. If you have an Android business phone that you use with an enterprise account, then other users with access to that account may see what you have been up to lately.

What you view at home, while accidentally being logged into your Enterprise Google Apps account could mean you have an awkward conversation with your boss.

There is no opting-out

No opt-out is offered by Google. Users who want to keep their account data separated only have two options: Create a separate Google account for each service they use, or cancel their Google account and move on to another service provider.

It is unlikely that many users will actually close their account as a consequence. Depending on which Google services are used, it could mean lots of work. And lets not forget that you’d need to research the new service’s privacy policies and terms of service as well.

Mitigation may be possible, if users log out of Google whenever possible. This could reduce the number of personalized ads and recommendations that they will see on Google product pages.

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Prevent Google Analytics from tracking your visit About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Wednesday January 25, 2012 -
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Privacy Initiative To Release Three Internet Explorer 9 Tracking Protection Lists

One of the new features that Microsoft introduced in their Internet Explorer 9 browser was support for so called Tracking Protection Lists. These lists can be installed in the browser to add protection against tracking, and as a side effect many forms of advertisement. A list of common TPLs is available at the Internet Explorer Test Drive website where they can be installed with just two clicks of the mouse.

The initial batch of Tracking Protection Lists have received public criticism as they did not necessarily had the best user intent in mind. Analysis of the available lists revealed for instance that one did not block a single domain name, but made sure that almost 4000 different domains were allowed.

Internet Explorer users who installed that particular TPL in their browser were not able to benefit from the new technology at all.

Microsoft yesterday revealed that a privacy initiative will release three new tracking lists in the coming days.

This week two leading privacy advocates – Simon Davies and Alexander Hanff of Privacy International – are releasing three new Tracking Protection Lists for Europe, including one focused on protecting children.

The lists will be made available on the Privacy Online from where they can then be installed directly into the Internet Explorer browser.

Child Protection: The child protection list has been designed to block all third party technologies embedded into any web site. Exceptions are added for third party technologies that are not used for tracking purposesWeb Analytics: Blocks web analytic software such as Google Analytics from tracking a user’s movement on the Internet or individual websites.Behavioural Tracking: The third and final list blocks scripts that are used for behavioral tracking on the Internet.

It is not clear when those lists become available. Users who are interested in installing those lists should first analyze them to make sure they are indeed benefiting from them.

The initiative in addition plans to release the Custom TPL Engine tool that allows users to create their own Tracking Protection Lists for use in Internet Explorer.

We have developed three different tracking protection lists covering three segments which through comprehensive research, have been highlighted as significant concerns. These include Child Protection, Analytics and general Behavioural Profiling, but our tools also allow you to build a custom list depending on your own requirements. For example, you may be happy to have companies use third party tools (like Google Analytics) to generate data on how their web site is used, but might not want advertising companies to track you across multiple web sites to build a behavioural profile. Similarly, you might be happy to allow companies to track you but might want more protection for your children. Or you may be happy for certain companies that you trust, to track your activities but not companies you have not developed a trust relationship with or companies where you do not receive direct value from such tracking.

Please note that Privacy Online is a project of the London School of Economics that is funded with a research grant from Microsoft.

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