You are probably aware, at least in the back of your mind, that you are being tracked as you surf the Web. Millions of websites have the ability to put tracking cookies on your computer. As you move from website to website, tracking companies record and store information about your online behavior: what kinds of web pages you visit and what kinds of links you click on. Over time, the tracking companies build up a profile about you. You might wonder, is this bad? And, what do they do with this profile anyway?
Here’s what they do: websites modify the page content you’re presented based on your profile.
Let’s say you are politically conservative and so you tend to read news articles critical of the President. Over time, the news articles you are presented will be biased in that direction. You will be shown more news articles critical of the President and fewer articles praising him. If you are politically liberal, the opposite will happen and you will be shown more news articles praising the President and fewer critical of him. Therefore, when you visit a news website, the stories you see may not be the stories I see on the same website. Because page content is modified according to our individual profiles, the picture of the world you get will not be the picture of the world that I get. This seems bad to me, as it tends to reinforce our existing biases, whether political, environmental, or whatever. But it doesn’t stop there.
If you shop online, you will probably go to a number of websites looking for the best deal. If you want to buy a camera online, you will likely visit several websites that contain reviews of cameras, then several more websites that sell cameras. The tracking companies see that behavior and feed that info back to the websites you’re visiting. The result may be that the price you see on the item you want is higher than the price that would be presented to someone who had not been shopping for that item. You may end up paying more because the website knows (or thinks it knows) you want to buy that item, and it knows, too, that eager buyers are willing to pay more.
I knew all this when I happened upon a browser plug-in called “DoNotTrackPlus”, or DNT+. The plug-in blocks tracking cookies while allowing other cookies that may be necessary for the website to function properly. The plug-in is free and is distributed by a company called Abine (www.abine.com). (Note: I am not an employee of Abine and I have no connection to the company.) Their plug-ins are compatible with Mac or PC for the following browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Installation is simple, and afterward your browser displays a small icon on the navigation toolbar indicating DNT+ status. The icon displays 1 of 3 background colors and a number in the center. The image below shows the icon as it appears in Firefox (right-most icon).
This icon indicates the website is trying to place 23 tracking cookies on my PC. The green background 
Here is an image from a different website. The icon shows the website is not 
A red background means that one or more tracking cookies cannot be blocked. So far, I haven’t encountered a site that DNT+ couldn’t block all tracking cookies.
Note that DNT+ doesn’t block all cookies, just tracking cookies. But sometimes this causes a problem with a web page and you may have to turn blocking off for that site. Or, you can unblock one tracking cookie at a time until you find the one causing the problem. So far, the only website where I’ve had to turn off blocking is the one you’re at right now: yes, Blogger (blogspot.com). If I block their tracking cookie, the line at the top of the screen with a link to the next blog disappears. But at least DNT+ remembers I turned blocking off for the site, so I don’t have to turn it off every time I visit the site.
What if you don’t care about being tracked? Are there other advantages to blocking tracking cookies?
Yes, there are. Sometimes my browser would hang while waiting for tracking cookies to load. That would cause my PC to freeze for a few seconds. I haven’t seen that behavior since I installed DNT+. And, pages seem to load faster.
One particular website places an annoying video at the bottom of every page, and it begins playing as soon as the page is loaded. To turn off the player I have to scroll down to the bottom of the page, pause the player, then scroll back to the top of the page to read it. It’s not a big deal, but it’s annoying to click a link and have a burst of loud sound coming from a player I can’t even see. Installing DNT+ seems to have stopped that; it hasn’t happened on visits to that site since I’ve been using DNT+.
If you decide to install DNT+, I would say it’s worth perusing their FAQs to understand how it works.
A final note: your profile, as compiled by the tracking companies, will not disappear just because you install DNT+. Installing DNT+ just means you won’t continue to be tracked.
[Update: Name change - DoNotTrackPlus (DNT+) is now called DoNotTrackMe.]
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