Topic: Cover Your Tracks lets you see how trackers view your browser & how secure it is

[Software Santa]

Cover Your Tracks lets you see how trackers view your browser & how secure you are against online tracking techniques.

https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

Cover Your Tracks See how trackers view your browser

Test your browser to see how well you are protected from tracking and fingerprinting:

How does tracking technology follow your trail around the web, even if you’ve taken protective measures? Cover Your Tracks shows you how trackers see your browser. It provides you with an overview of your browser’s most unique and identifying characteristics.

Only anonymous data will be collected through this site.


How do trackers work?
When you visit a website, your browser makes a "request" for that site. In the background, advertising code and invisible trackers on that site might also cause your browser to make dozens or even hundreds of requests to other hidden third parties. Each request contains several pieces of information about your browser and about you, from your time zone to your browser settings to what versions of software you have installed.

Some of this information is passed along by default simply to help you view the page. For example, HTTP headers are essential to most web functionality, and broadcast your device and browser version. But a lot of the information in your browser’s requests is also extracted by third-party ad networks, which have sneaky tracking mechanisms embedded across the Internet to gather your information.

At first glance, the data points that third-party trackers collect may seem relatively mundane and disparate. But when compiled together, they can reveal a detailed behavioral profile of your online activity, from political affiliation to education level to income bracket. As long as this trove of data about you is linked back to you, your online activity can be logged. Ad networks primarily rely on two methods to maintain this link: cookie tracking, and browser fingerprinting.


What are cookies?
Cookies are small chunks of information that websites store in your browser. Their main use is to remember helpful things like your account login info, or what items were in your online shopping cart—in other words, they save your place. But they can also be misused to link all your visits, searches, and other activities on a site together. This use of cookies is a privacy violation, and browsers generally allow you to block, limit, or delete cookies.


What is a digital fingerprint?
A digital fingerprint is essentially a list of characteristics that are unique to a single user, their browser, and their particular hardware setup. This includes information the browser needs to send to access websites, like the location of the website the user is requesting. But it also includes a host of seemingly insignificant data (like screen resolution and installed fonts) gathered by tracking scripts. Tracking sites can stitch all the small pieces together to form a unique picture, or "fingerprint," of your device.


What is the difference?
Think of the small tracking devices scientists use to follow animal migration patterns, or a GPS transmitter attached to a car. As long as they’re attached to the target animal or vehicle, they are accurate and effective—but they lose all value if they’re knocked off or discarded. This is roughly how cookies behave: they track users up until the point a user deletes them.

Fingerprinting uses more permanent identifiers such as hardware specifications and browser settings. This is equivalent to tracking a bird by its song or feather markings, or a car by its license plate, make, model, and color. In other words, metrics that are harder to change and impossible to delete.

https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/