Who's Tracking You

Online news and blog post articles comes at a high cost for your average web surfer. Not only are you downloading close to 5mb of data every time you visit Bloomberg, but you are also victim to the latest and greatest tracking services. Yep thats right! Just about every website you go to is tracking you in some sort of fashion.

What if you don't want to be tracked. Or what if you wanted to know who was tracking you. Well I found an awesome solution for both cases. Just last week I found this fantastic Safari extension known as Ghostery . Once you install Ghostery you will be able to both see who is tracking you, and block the trackers if you want. Since adding Ghostery it has truly opened up a new part of the web for me. As a web developer I'm always interested in what plugins and services that developers include in their websites. Ghostery is a great and easy way to see whats going-on on the other side of the wire.

So how does this opting out of ads and tracking services effect the status quo? The answer to this question may be better answered in another post, but the short answer is clear. Advertisers are going to be forced to come up with more clever and convenient ways of tracking clients. Services like Ghostery will continue to grow and become more and more popular. In return advertisers can expect to see a major decrease in ad revenue.

Tools like Ghostery immedietly puts the power of the open web back into the hands of the clients, and allows us to choose which services we'll allow to track us. For the most part I allow tracking services like social media share buttons, and specific beacons. Since using Ghostery and blocking ads everyday it appears that my connections speeds are just a tad faster, and it gives me a stronger peace of mine when I'm on a site I've never been to before.