What is collected about you online, who buys it, and the practical settings and habits that measurably reduce your exposure.
5 guides
Online privacy is not about having something to hide. It is about who holds a record of your behaviour, how precisely you can be identified without cookies, and which of those things you can practically change.
Permission granted in 2022 is still permission today. Most people have a dozen apps holding access to their location, contacts or microphone for a reason that expired years ago.
A data broker collects information about people it has never had a relationship with, assembles it into a profile, and sells access. Most people have never heard of the companies holding the most detailed records of them.
Tracking is not one technique but four, layered — cookies, pixels, identity resolution and offline data. Understanding which is which explains why blocking cookies changed much less than it seemed to.
A cookie is something you have, so you can throw it away. A fingerprint is something you are — the configuration of the device in your hand — and clearing your browser data does nothing to it.