Limit how Facebook, Google, Amazon use your private info
It can seem that it’s a lot easier to complain about your lack of privacy online than to do something about it. But your alternative to griping isn’t a monastic, offline existence.
Here are four steps to understand who has your data, limit their use of it and leave less “data exhaust” that can be used to trail you.
How Facebook, Google see you
In online advertising — that is, online interest tracking — there’s Facebook and Google and then everyone else. Both companies can know more about you than other firms online. Fortunately, both also let you see and edit their profiles of your tastes.
To check the social network’s sense of you, visit facebook.com/ads/preferences.
There, you’ll see interests Facebook thinks you have, advertisers using customer lists to market to you and, most important, settings governing whether Facebook can target you with ads on other sites.
Google’s comparable settings, at https://adssettings.google.com/, allow the same look at your perceived interests and let you decline to have it focus ads based on your search history or your use of Google services.
You can also see Google’s guess of your gender and age.
Use a privacy-protecting browser
Most of the eyes watching you on the Web sit on other sites, in the form of ads and widgets that let Facebook, Google and other ad networks monitor your activity outside their own realms.
Two browsers can easily curtail that tracking.
Don’t use same search engine
Setting at least one browser on one device to use a search site besides Google can obscure Google’s gaze. Microsoft’s Bing comes closest to matching Google’s features — its mapping site even includes some bus services that Google skips over, although it still lacks the cycling directions Google added in 2010. As one of the included search options in Google’s Chrome, it’s also one preference change away in that browser.
For tracking-free searches, try DuckDuckGo. Its complete lack of personalization can make queries there less accurate than Google’s, but in my experience its bigger flaw is not letting you limit a search to particular dates (a failing Google recently inflicted on the desktop version of its news search). In a Twitter direct message, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg said search-by-date is coming: “Yes, we are actively working on that feature.”
Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based out of Washington, D.C. Email rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robpegoraro.