If you read tech blogs and technology oriented sites regularly you notice that privacy is a hot topic on those sites. Most readers who visit those sites cherish their privacy, while the majority of Internet users are likely unaware of how their privacy may be compromised on the Internet. Tracking is directly related to a [...]

Categories: Browsing, Google Chrome

If you ask Windows users which temporary file cleaning program they use then the chance is high that you get CCleaner as the answer. The popular tool has not lost any of its appeal ever since it was first introduced by its parent company Piriform (I first reviewed the program in 2005). But CCleaner is [...]

Categories: Software, Windows

If you had to write down how much time you spend on the Internet in the past week, could you do that? And would you also be able to list the top 5 sites that you’d consider productive, and the top 5 time wasters in that time? To top that, would you be able to [...]

Categories: Browsing, Firefox

User tracking has been one of the hottest privacy topics over the past years. There have been light efforts to reduce user tracking, for instance by Mozilla with their Do Not Track headers. Many users on the other hand are not aware of the underlying issues, mostly because the tracking is done in the background [...]

Categories: Browsing, Firefox

Ever wanted to know what government agencies can find out about you thanks to telecommunications Data Retention laws? In telecommunications, data retention refers to the, often temporary, storage of phone records and Internet traffic by commercial organizations like phone companies and ISPs. Data types and retention time differs from country to country, but all can [...]

Categories: Security, The Web

Consumer Privacy made it in the news big time recently in the United States with the FTC’s (Federal Trade Commission) report on online consumer privacy. Microsoft, secretly until now, has been working on a feature called Tracking Protection for some time that they plan to ship with the release candidate and final version of the [...]

Categories: Browsing, Internet Explorer

Three researchers of the UC Berkeley School of Information have published results of an Internet privacy study that analyzed web privacy, data collection and information sharing on today’s Internet. Interested users can download the fill Internet privacy report from the project’s website or view the majority of its findings directly on the website. Each of [...]

Categories: Security, The Web

We have covered Phorm before at Ghacks. It is a very scary cooperation between several Internet Service Providers and advertising companies. The Internet Service Providers install tracking cookies on user systems and create a unique profile for each user which is then used by the advertising agencies to display targeted advertisement to the user. Especially [...]

Categories: Browsing, Firefox, Security

Adeona is a free Open-Source software to track your computer. It works completely independent and is running in the background on the computer system. It automatically recognizes a change of location by analyzing the network connection of the notebook. If someone would connect to a WLAN the software would automatically do IP lookups to determine [...]

Categories: Notebooks, Open Source, Software