{"id":7513,"date":"2014-05-02T11:45:20","date_gmt":"2014-05-02T15:45:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/?p=7513"},"modified":"2014-05-02T11:45:20","modified_gmt":"2014-05-02T15:45:20","slug":"four-innocent-online-activities-that-increase-your-chances-of-being-tracked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/four-innocent-online-activities-that-increase-your-chances-of-being-tracked\/","title":{"rendered":"Four Innocent Online Activities That Increase Your Chances of Being Tracked"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

4 Seemingly Innocent Online Activities That Track Your Behavior<\/h1>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/header>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

Online privacy is a big topic these days. Many people have heard about potential privacy issues with big name players like Facebook, Google, and the NSA. However, your privacy may be at risk in less obvious places, ones that you should be aware of\u2026<\/p>\n

Social Share Buttons<\/h2>\n

The web is plagued with social share buttons. On the one hand, they\u2019re a wonderful innovation that has really helped to speed the spread of information across the Internet. On the other hand, some companies have found a way to use these same buttons to track users and build profiles on them.<\/p>\n

The thing is that social share buttons can track your data even if you don\u2019t click them. As long as they load with the page, they\u2019re live. As you hop from website to website, these social share buttons can track your browsing habits and that data can be tied with your social networking accounts.<\/p>\n

Online Dating Profiles<\/h2>\n

\"tracking<\/p>\n

It shouldn\u2019t come as a surprise that online dating websitestrack your profile data<\/a>. It makes a lot of sense, actually, and many people are unfortunately blind to it. The more you fill out your profile, the greater the chance of finding a match. Because of this, online daters are quick to fill in as much information as they can without second thoughts.<\/p>\n

Background services on these websites are put in place to capture your input. It\u2019s a problem that exists beyond online dating, but this deserves a special mention here because people tend to forget that completing a profile means giving up a lot of personal information.<\/p>\n

To be clear, not all of these trackers are malicious. Some companies want to sell you something, sure, but others just want to help you find people and places that may interest you. Either way, you should be wary of online questionnaires in general as they might be building a profile based on your answers.<\/p>\n

Disqus Comments<\/h2>\n

\"tracking<\/p>\n

Disqus is a popular commenting platform that many websites use due to its streamlined nature and flexibility. It removes a level of anonymity because any website using Disqus must hook into its centralized database of accounts. This might be good for keeping civility and maximizing convenience, but not so great for privacy.<\/p>\n

Disqus can track your browsing behaviors across websites that use the service. In extreme cases, this data can be combined with other third-party tracking data to peel back further levels of anonymity, revealing more about you as a person. By taking part in Disqus-based discussions, you\u2019re granting them permission to do this.<\/p>\n

Google Webfonts<\/h2>\n

\"tracking<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a big fan of\u00a0Google\u2019s beautiful webfonts<\/a>\u00a0and James has written about why it\u2019s awesome and\u00a0how to start using Google webfonts<\/a>\u00a0on your website. However, there is a privacy-related drawback to using them.<\/p>\n

In most cases, websites don\u2019t host these free fonts locally; instead, they load the fonts directly off of Google\u2019s servers. This means that Google could potentially collect analytics on the website\u2019s viewers, which could be a troublesome issue for privacy freaks. Information being collected is limited, but it\u2019s being collected all the same.<\/p>\n

What Can You Do About It?<\/h2>\n

It\u2019s been mentioned before that\u00a0anonymity on the Internet is impossible<\/a>. However, different degrees of anonymity do exist and it is in your best interest to protect your online privacy as best as you can. Several ways exist to do this…<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Source: MakeUseOf\u00a0<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

4 Seemingly Innocent Online Activities That Track Your Behavior Online privacy is a big topic these days. Many people have heard about potential privacy issues with big name players like Facebook, Google, and the NSA. However, your privacy may be at risk in less obvious places, ones that you should be aware of\u2026 Social Share Buttons The web\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1426],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7513"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7513"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7514,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7513\/revisions\/7514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}