There are little things added to web pages to track you across the internet. You  have seen a time when you go to a website selling shoes then after that you start get hints suggesting shoes from other websites. Those are called 3rd Party Trackers.

The trackers come from many companies that you have heard from like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, etc. There are many more of these trackers from companies that you never heard of. The trackers give a tiny amount of money to websites that add the trackers to their web pages. But if a website gets a lot of views every day the money ends up being very good in the end.

It is almost impossible to stop all the trackers. I read this web page from the BBC last month. It starts out being about how TicTok is getting websites to add a tracker back to TicTok to get them on the tracker bandwagon. You can skip over that. Go down to the section “How to protect yourself.” The first suggestion is to switch a browser by Brave or DuckDuckGo (who knew that DuckDuckGo had a browser?). Both of those browsers have built in 3rd Party Tracker protection. I didn’t want to do that as I have been using the Firefox browser for any years. Another suggestion in that article is to add an ad blocker extension like Privacy Badger or Ghostery.

What I ended up adding was the “DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials” extension to my Firefox browser. It changed my search box to DuckDuckGo but then I changed that back to Google. I still had the protection.

After I added the extension I looked at some of the trackers that got blocked. On Dictionary.com there were 32 trackers that got blocked. That was the most of any website that I visited. The USPS.com website has trackers from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon and a few other ones that got blocked. On Ancestry.com there were trackers from Adobe, Google, and couple others.  I found out that if you see a YouTube video on this blog then there is a tracker from Google that gets blocked by the DuckDuckGo extension. That sure amazed me but I should have known that Google, which owns YouTube, would be snooping on viewers of the video.

You can’t eliminate all the 3rd Party Trackers but you sure can cut down on them with either a new browser or a browser extension.