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08/01/2018

Facebook and Google are watching you: how to deal with it

Popular Internet services collect almost all available information about their users.

According to Meduza, once searching, for example an umbrella, you will be shown advertising banners with an umbrella on all Internet sites. Thus, technological giants are trying to understand what kind of advertising is best to show, and what most like one or the other user.

Completely someone is unlikely to be able to ban information about yourself. However, you can reduce the amount of data transferred or at least prohibit their use.

Disable personalized ads on Facebook and Twitter. Understand with Google. Install the Ghostery or Disconnect extension.

What to do with Facebook

First, you can see what information Facebook uses to show you advertising. Under this link you will see that, according to the social network, you are interested. There may be publications that you read, or places you have never visited (for example, Facebook believes that I’m interested in the province of Entre Rios in Argentina, although I have never heard of it). In addition, the service displays information about advertisers whose ads you clicked on. All this information the service uses to show you banners, which you click more likely.

To prevent Facebook from using the information collected about you, you need to go to the “Ads on Facebook” settings and set all the switches in the “no”, “none”.

What to do with Twitter

Twitter behaves much like Facebook. In the settings, you can find out how many advertisers are interested in you. To get into this section, you need to click on your userpic in the upper right corner, then: “Settings and Security”> “Your data is on Twitter”. And to pass to the point “Target Audiences”.

To prevent Twitter from showing personalized ads (this is the maximum that can be done, information about you will still be collected), you must disable all the checkmarks in the “Personalization and Data” menu.

What to do with Google

Google knows which sites you visited, which videos you watched on YouTube, monitors your preferences in advertising, and even remembers the history of voice search. We have already written a detailed instruction on how to protect ourselves from all this.

How to reduce the amount of data collected about you in principle

To begin with, you should realize how much the browser knows about you (it gives this information to other sites). Your location, what kind of computer you have, what operating system, what social networks you are logged into. Just go to this page and scroll down.

To limit the amount of information collected, you need to install an extension that prevents the browser from connecting to all sorts of counters and trackers. To do this, you can use Ghostery or Disconnect. They work roughly the same, only in Ghostery you first need to select what you want to block; in Disconnect, you do not need to choose anything.

Almost certainly these extensions will block advertising; remember that the online media live off of advertising.

Installing these applications will get rid of the fact that you are watching trackers (including Facebook), but not a browser. To prevent the browser from receiving the above information, you will need to enable the hardest locking mode in extensions such as uBlock Origin (for Google Chrome) or No Script (for Mozilla Firefox). After that, however, you will stop working many sites, for example, YouTube.

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