STOP Being TRACKED Across the Internet! (here’s how)

So you're probably already aware that you're being tracked online. In fact, unless you've intentionally turned it off, Google is tracking the fact that you're watching this video right now, how long you watch it for, and what you decide to watch next. In today's short video, I wanna explain the important difference between the invisible trackers and so-called cookies that follow us all over the internet, and then give you a couple practical tips, completely free to hide yourself. Welcome to All Things Secured. My name's Josh, and I'm not gonna try to play innocent here. If you visit our website at allthingssecured.com, you'll find that I do have a tracker that goes by the name Google Analytics. We use Google Analytics to help understand the aggregate audiences that visit the website, but we've decided against using something a little more privacy-invasive like Facebook Pixel. Now, before we talk about what this means for you, I wanna help you understand the difference between a tracker and a cookie. A cookie is, it's like a name tag that a website puts on you anytime you visit the website. It's a small data file that sits on your computer, and it serves as an identifier. When that website sees that particular name tag, which only has meaning to that particular domain, they can greet you by name and remember who you are. That is a cookie. A tracker, on the other hand, is code on the website itself that assesses you, and then sends that information elsewhere. The very act of visiting the website triggers the tracker to collect and send any data it can find on you. So instead of a name tag, you can think of it almost like an automated scanner that passively profiles you. I like to see it kind of like an advanced security camera that has the ability to measure my temperature, my height, recognize that I'm a male, surmise that I'm in my 30s or 40s, and so on. Most places on the internet use a combination of both cookies and trackers, and that's not always a bad thing. I mean, cookies are what allow us to visit Amazon without having to log in every single time. Amazon sees that unique name tag that they put on you last time, AKA the cookie, and therefore they don't make you retype your email and password every time. It's convenient. Unfortunately, some websites just take this a bit too far. CNN, for example, has 31 trackers, and they tried to give me seven cookies when I visited their homepage. And just so you don't think that I'm trying to throw one biased news source under the bus, Fox News had 36 trackers and eight cookies, while the UK's Daily Mail tried to hit me with 35 trackers and five cookies. If you ever wonder why a lot of these websites load slowly, this is many times part of the reason. Okay, so what can you do about this? We've already talked about the data that is collected from you when you do a search on Google, as well as the data that they pass along to the website, and I recommend you go ahead and watch this video next if you haven't already. But how can you hide from the general internet? I'm gonna give you two thoughts for you to consider here. The first is to make a switch to a more privacy-focused browser like Brave. It's a great browser, I'm not saying it's the best, but it does offer the best privacy protections right out of the box, meaning you don't have to play with any of the settings or download anything extra to get it to do what we need it to do. For those of you who don't wanna migrate over to a new internet browser, and trust me, I understand, I like what I have with Firefox right now, there is one other option. You've actually seen me using it in this video, and that's the Privacy Extension from Startpage. It's free to download, and it works for Firefox, Chrome, and every other Chromium-based browser like Edge, Opera, and so many others. There are a couple extensions like this, but what I like about Startpage Privacy Extension is that every time I visit a website, I see an immediate privacy score from one to five, with one being terrible and five being great, and that's before they block any of the trackers or cookies. By clicking on this, I can see how many trackers and cookies the extension blocked from that particular website. Now, I'll stop here and quickly explain that it's pretty easy to stop cookies from being downloaded, but when it comes to trackers, the extension can't stop you from being noticed as a visitor to the website. It can, however, cloak you. In other words, you'll still be counted in my Google Analytics when you visit All Things Secured, but it will be much harder, if not impossible, to gather all the data that allows big data companies to fingerprint you based on your web browser, your OS, all of these different things. What's cool about the Startpage extension that other extensions I've tried don't do is that I can go through and individually allow certain cookies, if need be. In some cases, a website just doesn't work properly without cookies, so you need to be able to allow what they need without giving them blanket permission to upload anything they want to your computer. Finally, the extension gives you the ability to do an anonymous search with Startpage, which uses Google search results without all of that Google tracking. This is useful if you prefer another search engine, but still want the option to do an anonymous search in certain cases. If you wanna give either Brave or Startpage extension a try, I'll have direct links in the description below this video. And once you're done with that, watch this video where I explain nine other secrets to being invisible online. I promise you'll learn something new that you didn't know before.