Hi malware fighters,
Most browser users are not aware about third party tracking. Google Analytics is still the biggest threat to your privacy concerns, tracking you online with five popular webtrackers they acquired. Just visiting one single website could mean you are being tracked by a dozen webtrackers.
Take this example: http://www.webanalisten.nl/ 8 trackers found: GoogleAnalytics, MyBlogLog, Index tools, Wordpress stats, FeedBurner, Woopra, Clicky and ClickTale. During one month researchers found one hundred of these so-called webbugs on one single site, e.g.: Google’s blogspot.com. The search giant owns the five most popular webtrackers like Analytics, DoubleClick, AdSense, FriendConnect and Widgets, and knows more about you online than you could know yourself probably. For the top 100 sites Google Analytics was on 81.
This nice Firefox add-on will keep an eye on the sites that keep an eye on you:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9609
Combine this with Foxbeacon webbugdetector: https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/9202
and we have all the information you need for the privacy concerned.
Well not completely true, with Google or Nedstat trackers or whatever it is reasonably simple to detect monitoring, because the browser has to actively send a request to their tracking service, but there are also technical means to do this tracking through realtime network protocol analysis/ a sort of “eavesdropping”/“listening in” inside the web infrastructure or simply analyzing web server log files.
And a user normally is totally unaware about this going on.
And then there is also the item of Super Cookies or Flash Cookies.:
http://forums.comodo.com/anti_virusmalware_productsother_security_products/automatically_blockdelete_super_cookies-t39123.0.html;msg283308#msg283308
Another option here is to just block this, a good list can be found here:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=1281125&p=6646655
Through the Firefox add-on NoScript you could also establish where the curious sites are and block these where the tracking is being done using JavaScript. For instance in NoScript you can mark google-analytics.com as untrusted, so getting and running “http://google-analytics.com/ga.js” is halted…
NoScript add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722
A particulary nice add-on for blocking third party request is this extension: RequestPolicy -
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9727
Experimental but I have it for a year now and no problem with this whatsoever.
This extension is to control which cross-site requests are allowed. Improve the privacy of your browsing by not letting other sites know your browsing habits. Secure yourself from Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and other attacks.
Combining NoScript, RequestPolicy and AdBlockPlus you have a trio to protect your browser security and privacy. The other two are to know where the tracking comes from (Ghostery) and what the tracking is about (Fox beacon),
What you do with this information is your concern, at least you have it,
polonus