This is about profit and which company gets it. The data of every one of us is all over the internet. I run several programs that block the invasive cookies and website to website movement I make across the internet. Why? No I am not doing anything wrong, I just feel if the businesses that build these huge databases about all of us should pay me for that information as they sell it to other companies at a huge profit to gain access to me for their adverts. If you doubt that check your emails or ads on sites you visit and think how closely they compare to your web history. It is incredible how much companies know about us … by my dogs that love gravy I recently went to a website and my ad blocker did not catch the advert for therapist for people abused as children, on a website totally not about that. They could only have gotten my information on me being an abused child by combing my blog with WordPress’s permission, or from violating the policies of the survivor site I have shared my abuse on. Either way it is not their right to have this information on me or use it to push me to a paid sponsor. Face it people today we, each are the product, keeping us on each web page, the more clicks to the next story the better, that drives their advertisement dollars and the clicks add to what they can tell their bosses to keep them or to generate new shareholders to join. The likes drive their income. It is a sad place we are in. I use two different anti tracker programs and one really good ad blocker program because I am not a number / cog for their sales divisions. But still they somehow sometimes get through. Hugs Scottie
Is TikTok a threat to US national security?
Scottie's Playtime 
I agree. It has gone too far. They make way too much $$ from spying on us. There needs to be something to curtail this atrocity.
I refuse to click on my obviously targeted ads. I refuse to click on any ad. I’ve also switched to Duck Duck Go, to block whatever it can catch.
Many times I’ll visit a site that immediately informs me “It looks like you are using an ad blocker.” Then there is an option to register, or turn off my ad blocker.
Fuck you! I’m leaving.
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It’s not only adds that are targeted, Your search engine results are in no small way determined by past browsing and search history.. It actually reinforces confirmation bias, hence conspiracy theorists are more likely to be fed links to conspiracy websites and Christian apologists are more likely to be fed search results leading to sites promoting and supporting apologetics than sites criticising it. Search engines such as Google and Bing and social sites such as YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, etc all keep tabs on your history with the intent of “making your Internet experience better targeted to your ‘needs'”.
For general browsing on a new topic of interest I always go in browser incognito mode (cookies are deleted when the session ends) and usually via a VPN, and use multiple search engines across multiple browsers. While there’s no guarantee that I won’t be feed biased results, it’s much less likely than if I don’t take precautions.
And as cookies are not shareable between browsers, I use specific browsers for specific ranges of search topics. I have experimented in the past with “training” specific social media sites and search engines via specific browsers to favour a particular perspective. It doesn’t take long to train a search engine or social media site to present a specifically chosen bias. I do it intentionally to understand how and why many people (including some who are nearest and dearest to me) are easily lead to a biased perspective, but most people are completely unaware of how easily their pre-existing biases are reinforced by their internet activity.
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Hi Barry. Wow that is impressive. I wish I had your memory and attention to detail. I have two white boards and scrap paper everywhere on my desk and around me to remember things. While I also use different browsers, I just can not be as disciplined as you are. I already described all the attempts I take to avoid tracking and being used to Shelldigger so I won’t repeat it. But I have never tried the incognito mode on any browser, but my tor one is set kind of that way by default. Is the use of the incognito mode worth using and how does it affect the browsing. Thanks Barry, you teach me new things all the time. Best Wishes. Scottie
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Incognito mode is just an additional tool in the armoury. When you use incognito mode:
Your browsing history is not saved.
Cookies and site data are deleted after your session ends.
Information entered in forms is not saved for use in other forms.
Depending on the browser it can also hide information about your device, your device login ID and more. As you may have noticed, modern browsers are capable of auto filling information on web forms, even on pages you haven’t visited previously. They rely of common names for fields such as “first name”, “street address” and “phone” etc to pre-load the information. What you may not know is that a web page can have a hidden form that can collect this information without you realising its existence, thereby compromising your privacy. In incognito mode such information stored by the browser is not available.
Some sites do react negatively to incognito mode, but I consider such sites not worthy of being accessed in normal mode. They are relatively rare, much like sites that object to being accessed via a VPN. Some websites make use of databases that have a list of VPN IP addresses, so while such sites many not know your ISP IP address they do know that you are visiting via a VPN.
I’m not averse to “gaming” the system. For example I have quite a few YouTube accounts, each of which has a specific purpose. For example I use one account exclusively for autism related videos, so than is now almost exclusively what appears in suggested videos to watch. Another I use for LGBTQIA+ videos. In both of these, I click mostly on supportive videos. I have another account where I click mostly on anti LGBTQIA+ videos and videos that pathologise autism or treat autism a collection of deficits in need of a cure, and now that is mostly what I am fed when using that account.
In all threes cases, it does save wading through a lot of unrelated material to find what you are after. One advantage of using incognito mode in my preferred browser is that it completely isolates each tab so that I can log into YouTube using a different account on different tabs. If I attempted the same in normal mode, every YouTube tab would recognise the most recent login regardless of which tab the login occurred. And, yes, the ads presented do vary depending on which YouTube account I am logged into.
I do a similar thing with Google and Bing search engines, and the search results are different depending on which account I am logged in with. I don’t think Duckduckgo keeps tabs on its visitors, so that’s my preferred search engine for general searching, although if I’m not logged into Google, Bing or Yandex, the search results are not significantly different.
One final observation, generally ads themselves do not compromise your privacy if you don’t click on them. The selection of ads you are presented with are the result of existing compromises in privacy (or not). As I have previously stated, I generally don’t block ads except those known by the browser to be malicious. In fact there have been one or two occasions where the types of ads being presented led me to identify a breach in privacy from a separate source. Of course, I have a gigabit speed internet connection so page loading time is negligible regardless of content. YMMV
🙇🏼
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Hi Shelldigger I agree. I also switched to Duck Duck Go. I use a free ad blocker called Ad block plus or ABP for short. Works great. I also have and run constantly Nordvpn and turned on the ad blocker, plus I run Ashampoo WinOptimizer 26 and Norton utilities at full privacy settings.
So I rarely see an ad, unless it is inside a video done by the person doing the video and I can forward out of them. I wouldn’t mind adverts if they were not being used to build databases on all of us for money. If you want my preferences, needs, desires, then pay me for them and I will let you have them.
There is a workaround to the turn the ad blocker on page blocker that I learned recently and about 90 percent of the time it works. Reload the page repeatedly and hit stop as soon as it starts to load. Most of the time it blocks the blocker from coming up, and you can read the article. It takes me about three or four times normally. It doesn’t work on all websites, but it does on the majority of them. Hugs. Scottie
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I will try that next time. Thanks for the tip Scottie!
The kind of $$ these jackasses make keeping tabs on us, we ought to be getting some kickback. If that were the case I might play along. But as it is, fuck em.
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