There is no anonymity: who and how is following us on the Internet and what can be done about it

ISPs, browsers, data brokers - people, organizations and programs can track what literally every user is doing on the Internet. This is not necessarily a violation of the law: the purpose of collecting data can be advertising or research. New methods of protection against surveillance on the Internet are constantly being developed and implemented, but universal solutions do not yet exist, writes Currently,

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While using the Internet, you have probably noticed such “coincidences” many times: you go to the website of a car dealership, and then you are shown advertisements for cars everywhere. Or, after visiting a parenting website, you are bombarded with advertisements for diapers and baby formula.

All this is possible because the largest advertising networks and many other Internet services for collecting information (data brokers) are trying to compose the most complete portrait of each Internet user based on all kinds of, often open data. They usually do it.

Anyone can follow you on the Internet - both by legal means and in violation of the rights to protect personal information. It is difficult to defend against some methods of surveillance, but it is necessary to defend against others. But, even armed with all means of counteraction, remember: it is guaranteed to avoid Internet surveillance only by physically disconnecting from access to the network. And that's not a fact.

Internet Service Providers

Every time you go online, your Internet provider or mobile operator issues a unique IP address to the device connecting to the network (computer, smartphone, tablet). It can be individual or used by several devices at once. But the main thing is that it is at this address that the device user is easiest to compare with a physical address, passport data, bank account numbers, and so on. Unless you're using a public Internet connection like a Wi-Fi hotspot in a coffee shop.

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Technically, ISPs are capable of viewing everything that you transmit over the Internet in unencrypted form. That is why it is worth using sites with a secure connection (https) or additionally using VPN providers. VPN is an intermediary that provides the same Internet access over an encrypted communication channel to protect against external eavesdropping. It is only important not to forget that this does not provide one hundred percent invulnerability: you simply trust your data to another company, often from another country. Experienced users can organize a VPN server for themselves and become their own VPN provider, which will reduce some of the risks. However, in this case, the hosting company will already have access to open communications, where you will host the VPN server.

All telecom operators are required by law to cooperate with law enforcement agencies in investigations and provide them with access to user data, and sometimes even facilitate access to secure communications.

While strong encryption seriously complicates Internet surveillance, the server address is usually transmitted unencrypted first for key exchange and secure connections. And this also contributes to vulnerability: in order to receive sensitive information, it is often not so important what exactly you are transmitting. It matters where or from where. The connection facts and associated information (metadata), when combined with other information available to your providers, will reveal a lot about you, even without access to your encrypted data.

Imagine that an attacker with access to your mobile operator's network sees that your smartphone is connected to a cell tower on the territory of one of the hospitals. Five minutes after that, the operator recorded that you went to the https site of the cancer center (with encryption). An attacker will not be able to easily find out exactly which pages you have viewed on this site, but he can reasonably assume that you have some kind of cancer problem.

How to deal? It is unlikely that you can completely protect yourself from snooping through providers, but it can be complicated if you use encrypted connections, a VPN, guest Internet access, proxy servers (to hide your IP address), anonymizing Tor network, and other similar services.

Internet companies: through cookies

You have probably seen many times on websites a pop-up block “We use cookies, click “OK” if you agree, or leave if not” and usually click “OK” to get rid of the annoying block. But meanwhile, it is thanks to cookies (read as “cookies”, literally translated from English as “cookies”) that you can be easily tracked on the Internet.

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Cookies are small pieces of text containing information about your preferences that sites store on your computer through your browser. For your convenience, first of all: a news site can “remember” the selected font size and favorite categories, an online store can save items from your cart (to restore them if you lose connection), a social network can record a special session code in cookies so that you I didn't have to constantly enter my username and password.

As usual, problems appeared along with convenience: cookies make it easy to track the activity of Internet users. Although browsers do not allow sites to read other people's cookies (say, Facebook.com does not have access to settings saved by Amazon.com and vice versa), there are many tricks.

If the code of a single web analytics system (for example, from Google) or the like button (from Facebook), or the code of a large advertising network is installed on different sites, then the owners of all these systems will be able to save and read their cookies from different sites, thereby tracking your activities on the Internet. You go to a site selling fishing rods, where an advertising system is installed, and it has already read its cookie: “Oh, so it was user number 123456 who looked! He seems to be interested in fishing, we should show him more advertisements like this now.”

This, of course, is a very simplified description: systems are constantly evolving and often to track users compare information from all available sources with other data (for example, IP addresses, data from people’s profiles on social networks, forums, etc.) to get the most complete portrait of each and most effectively show him an advertisement.

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How to deal? Use the latest browser versions. Chrome, Firefox, Safari announced and implemented a number of anti-surveillance features. You can also switch to incognito mode or disable cookies altogether (a radical option). Another option is to install browser extensions to help protect against surveillance (PrivacyBadger, Lightbeam, Ghostery and others), or regularly clean cookies manually. Some data companies allow users to opt out of surveillance through the site. Digital Advertising Alliance.

Internet companies: through browser fingerprints

But far from always, companies need to bother with cookies to track you on the Internet.

Visit the site Amiunique (or another similar), click My browser fingerprint - and you will be shown how unique your computer and browser are, that is, how easy it is to track it among other visitors.

Any site can receive a lot of data about the browser and the device on which it is running: program version, time zone, installed fonts, languages ​​and dozens of other settings. While each of these details may not make you stand out from the crowd, together they often create a device's unique digital fingerprint. And you too.

For example, hundreds of thousands of people using the Windows version of the Chrome browser can constantly visit a site. But only one of them will have the Chrome browser version 76.0.3509 for Windows 8.1 at a screen resolution of 1920 × 1080, while the system will have English, French, Kazakh and Russian languages. Accordingly, such a user is assigned a unique identifier and in the future information about him is collected throughout the Internet. This is what data brokers do: they collect, buy and sell the most detailed information about user profiles. In a very simplified form, it may look like this: a person with the XXYYYZZ imprint is most likely at the age of 18-25, not married, loves travel and cars, smokes, lives, most likely, in the city N or the surrounding area. However, profiles will often contain a lot of details, especially if the person is active on the Internet.

Digital fingerprints are used for more than just internet surveillance, of course. Bank sites can use them for additional protection: if the user has always logged in through Safari on MacOS, when trying to log in through Firefox on Windows, you will be prompted to enter your username and password again, just in case.

How to deal? Use the latest browser versions. Chrome, Firefox, Safari announced and implemented a number of features to combat surveillance. A radical solution is to disable Javascript, the language used to collect data; but most sites then immediately “break down”. You can try switching to the most popular smartphone-tablet-laptop in your region and not personalize the settings.

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