Cover Your Tracks see who is watching you

Are you protected from online surveillance? The EFF Cover Your Tracks website has the answer

Cover Your Tracks is one online testing by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to determine how well a browser protects its user data from online surveillance.

When you link to a page using a browser, the information will be automatically revealed on the site. The pages may run scripts to collect additional information such as: what device you are using which browser, and many more that can be used to track users on the Internet.

Cover Your Tracks is based on the tool Panopticlick of the EFF which the organization started in 2010 and was updated in 2015.

Panopticlick redirects users to the new Cover Your Tracks tool automatically.

One click on the "test your browser" button and a quick check will begin to determine the following:

• Does the browser block ads?
• Excludes trackers?
• Displays those who do not respect the Do Not Track setting
• Does the browser have a unique fingerprint?

The test results are displayed on a page immediately after the test.

The aggregate information displayed by the test (pictured above) may not reveal much, but explaining the results below is very helpful.

One of the main differences between Panopticlick and Cover Your Tracks is that the latter goal is to go one step further than the first. Panopticlick showed if the browser fingerprint was unique and Cover Your Tracks reveals all the data displayed by a browser.

Based on the findings, users will be able to change their browser settings or install extensions to limit web browsing. The EFF recommends the use of the application Privacy Badger to combat web trackers and use a browser, (see Brave), which has built-in and activated fingerprint protection.

Third-party extensions such as NoScript, uBlock Origin or Canvas Blocker can also be used to limit web monitoring.

The EFF states that the trials do not cover all of the tracking techniques that websites may use to conduct online tracking.