Protect yourself from online tracking? The website Cover Your Tracks of the EFF 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 connect to a page using a browser, information will automatically begin to be revealed on the website. The pages may run scripts for the collection additional information such as: what device you use which browser, and many others 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 aggregated information displayed by the test (the above picture) may not reveal much, but the explanation of the results below is very useful.
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 them settings browser or install extensions to limit online tracking. EFF recommends using the app Privacy Badger to fight online Tracker and the use of 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.
