Tracking is directly related to a user’s privacy online. Tracking happens in a number of ways, but they all have in common that they track the user globally and not only on a single domain or website.

This is done with a number of technological tricks, cookies for instance, unique identifiers or even a user’s IP address if it is not dynamic.

User profiles are generated that are either sold to other companies, or used to display targeted ads to that user.

Do Not Track Plus is an extension for the Chrome browser that informs users about tracking on websites and at the same time blocks those scrips from being executed.

When you visit a website you will see the extension’s address bar icon indicate the number of tracking related scripts that run on the site. All tracking related scripts are sorted into the three categories social buttons, ad networks and companies.

You can click on an entry to see a detailed listing of the scripts that run on the site.

Social buttons are blocked from sending out information. They remain active though which means that you can still like, tweet or +1 posts when you click on them. If you do, the functionality is activated again by Do Not Track Plus.

Ad networks display the scripts that track your activities on the current site. The extension links to opt-out information to prevent those sites from tracking you automatically (for as long as the cookie stays on your system, that is).

The third and final group is a list of all scripts that are tracking you on the site. You can unblock specific companies here. Keep in mind that this is a site-specific setting. If you disable the blocking of Adsense here on Ghacks, you will still have it blocked on all other sites by default.

Why would you want to unblock ads on some sites? To support the webmaster and site operators of course.

The extension furthermore computes an overall score of tracking related scripts that it blocked for you. You can turn off the extension on particular sites with a click on the On button in the top left corner of the screen. One of the issues that you will experience if you turn it off completely or on a per-script basis is that you need to reload the page manually before the changes become visible.

A click on Settings displays all companies that the extension recognizes on the web. Here you can unblock a specific company globally.

Watch the video below for more information:

The core issue that I personally have with the program is that it is not available in the Chrome web store, but only on the developer’s website.

Chrome users can download Do Not Track Plus from that website.

Update: The add-on is also available in a version for the Firefox and Opera web browser.

But CCleaner is nowhere near as complete as it could be. This has for instance been shown by CCleaner Enhancer, a program that adds more than 200 different cleaning rule sets to CCleaner.

Windows users looking for a CCleaner alternative have several programs at their disposal. I reviewed some of them, like System Ninja or Clear Prog in the past here on Ghacks Technology News.

Wipe 2011 is another CCleaner alternative. The program concentrates more on privacy and tracking orientated traces on the system and even identifies data that CCleaner does not find by default.

When you first start the program you will notice that it will start to scan the system for tracks and garbage. The delete tracks and garbage option is selected by default. This setting is a click one delete all option, a click on continue would delete all data found by Wipe 2011 during the scan.

Users who want more control over the process should switch to the Advanced cleaning mode option which displays the programs findings in list form with options to prevent the cleaning of specific data points on the PC system.

The advanced listing displays all of its findings in table form. listed are the type of data search, the files and Registry entries found and the total amount of disk space in bytes occupied by the data.

Checkboxes are provided to enable or disable groups or individual titles from the cleanup.

CCleaner users will find that Wipe 2011 lists several data locations that CCleaner ignores. Among them the CryptnetURL cache, RSS feeds cache, Direct3D recent program list, game statistics or the recent wallpaper list.

A right-click on any title in the Wipe 2011 software opens a context menu with options to view all contents of a particular location in the application or to delete its contents manually.

Wipe’s missing a backup and restoration option. The program can wipe data permanently from standard platter driven hard drives. Users who want that need to switch from standard deletion to anti-recovery overwrites in the program settings.

Wipe 2011 is a handy CCleaner alternative with a focus on privacy and tracking related data. Windows users can download the program from the developer website. The application is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

While most users would probably be able to name the top sites that they’d consider most productive and time wasting, only a handful would surely be able to come up with exact figures for the last 30 days.

That’s where the Firefox add-on Surf Control steps in. The add-on tracks web usage over time and displays information about a user’s Internet usage in a dashboard in the browser. To add to that, it also allows the user to define sites as productive or time wasting, and to block sites completely or after a certain allowed usage period.

The tracking happens automatically. When you open the dashboard of the application, you will see the top productive and time wasting site, the productivity over time, browsing habits of current week and the top sites of the week.

Productive sites are marked in blue, unproductive sites in read and sites that have not been marked by the user as productive or unproductive.

A click on Details lists the top productive and time wasting sites of the week, and how time has been wasted in the last 30 days of Internet surfing (provided that the add-on had been installed for that time).

But the add-on is not only about tracking a user’s web usage over time. It can furthermore be used to limit or entirely block access to selected web sites or services.

Blocking a site outright blocks site access whenever the site is opened in the web browser. You can alternatively limit site usage per day to a specific amount of minutes per day. The very same blocked page message appears when you try to open the web page after the time runs out for the day.

This is obviously not a protection but more of a self-control feature. You can easily adjust the time or unblock sites any time in the dashboard.

When you first install SurfControl you need to add the add-on’s buttons to one of Firefox’s toolbars. This is done by selecting Firefox > Options > Toolbar Layout and by dragging and dropping the extension’s icons to the desired location.

Firefox users can download and install SurfControl from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

The Firefox add-on Collusion is an attempt to visualize how websites and services are connected with each other. It is not all about advertising and user tracking though, it is about all connections that websites have with each other.

How does it work? The extension starts collecting connection information directly after it has been installed in the web browser. This is an automatic process that requires no user interaction from that point forward.

The extension adds an icon to the Firefox status bar. When you click on it, it launches the visualization screen in a new tab in the browser. Even with the page open it continues to update the connections in realtime whenever new web pages are opened.

Each dot represents a domain, connected with lines. These lines visualize the connections between sites. Colors are used to distinct between standard domains and domains that track users who visit those domains. Tracking domains are shown in red in the visualization.

Collusion displays information about individual domains on the same page. These information are displayed in the upper right corner of the screen. This includes information about the domain or tracking service, and the websites that it is connected to.

The visualization grows tremendously in size over time, and one of the criticisms that I have is that it is not possible to zoom in or out of the visualization or enter a domain name to display its connections in the list.

Update: It is possible to use the browser’s zoom in and zoom out feature to zoom.

Collusion is not available at the Mozilla add-on repository. The extension is only available at the developer website. Cautious users may want to look at the source code first before they compile the add-on or install the compiled version directly.

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 be used for traffic analysis to create a tracking profile.

German politician Malte Spitz managed to receive six month worth of data from Germany’s largest telecommunication company Deutsche Telekom. He forwarded the information to Zeit Online, a German newspaper, which used the information to create a detailed tracking profile of the last six month of the politician.

Geolocation information were linked to Internet activities like Twitter messages or blog postings. The tracking profile uses Google Maps to display information about the politican’s location at any given time of the six month. Information about incoming and outgoing calls, SMS messages and connection to the Internet have been made available as well. It is for instance possible to determine exactly when and where calls where made, and how long they lasted.

Please note that Zeit Online is a German website which means that all texts and information are in German. you can click on the play button to see the movement on the map. The Geschwindigkeit (speed) slider can be used to decrease or increase the speed. Take note that the location can be determined to the minute.

The tracking on the map appears to be detailed enough to determine the location at any given time providing that the user is in the country.

Head over to Zeit Online to play around with the tool.

What’s your take on it? Make sure you check out Creepy! Track Michael Arrington, Or Anyone Else, Via Geolocation which can also be used to track people. (via)

• IE9 will offer consumers a new opt-in mechanism (“Tracking Protection”) to identify and block many forms of undesired tracking.
• “Tracking Protection Lists” will enable consumers to control what third-party site content can track them when they’re online.

According to this information, Tracking Protection allows IE9 users to manage some forms of tracking on the Internet. Tracking Protection allows them to maintain a list of domains and sites that may track them while they are online, while the remaining sites are blocked from doing so.

The feature is designed as a opt-in which means that users have to activate it to use it. This could mean that the majority of Internet Explorer users will be unaware of that option.

The video suggests that users need to select tracking scripts or images on a website to block them with Tracking Protection in Internet Explorer 9. The good news is that these blocked contents stay blocked over sessions and on other domains as well. Information are added to a so called Tracking Protection List which “contains web addresses (like msdn.com) that the browser will visit (or “call”) only if the consumer visits them directly by clicking on a link or typing their address”. This means that connections to resources in the list are blocked if they are made from other web pages which is usually the case for third party cookies for instance.

It seems as if lists could be offered by websites, and that IE9 will update those lists once per week. I’m not entirely sure if this is a way for websites to offer their users a way to opt out of tracking mechanisms on their website, of if those lists can also be global lists to include hundreds or thousands of tracking mechanisms.

The IE blog offers a fairly large introduction of the Tracking Protection feature which interested users can access for additional information about the feature.

Each of the four main areas consumer complaints, web bugs, privacy policies and affiliate analysis is divided into key findings, recommendations and methodology. They are complemented by an introduction and an analysis of the top 50 websites on the Internet.

Some interesting findings of the Internet privacy study reveal that Google is able to track users on 92 of the 100 most visited websites on the Internet and still 88% of a total of 393,829 analyzed distinct domains. The high percentage is a combination of services owned by Google including Google Analytics, Google Adsense and DoubleClick.

Microsoft was the company on the second place with an appearance on 60% on the top 100 websites followed by Omniture and Quantcast with 57%. A similar observation was made in the Privacy Policies analysis. All sites making up the top 50 sites of the Internet collect user data and at least 46 share that data with affiliates without disclosing who those affiliates are. The majority on the other hand claims to offer no access to the data to third parties which can be confusing for the user as affiliates are usually seen as third party from the user’s point of view.

The Internet privacy study draws a grim picture of the state of today’s online privacy.

Why is Phorm so dangerous? The tracking is definitely a privacy issue. The user cannot opt out of the tracking and data like search queries and visited websites are stored and analyzed. Since British companies are world renowned for data safety it is only a matter of time before data leaks user profiles.

Firephorm is a Firefox extension that is forging the cookies placed on the system to make the tracking system useless. It provides the option to forge the master cookie and the tracking cookies to either poison the system by using random cookies, using an opt-out cookie or from an UID list specified by the user.

The Firefox extension modifies http requests and response headers and can also warn the user if a webpage request was redirected via Phorm’s webwise.net.

Those information would then be compiled, encrypted and used by the OpenDHT distributed storage service to store a location update of the notebook. These location updates can then be retrieved from another computer revealing information about IP addresses (internal and external), the time, access points and nearby routers.

This information can be filtered to display only data of a specific date range. This should be tested at least once to make sure everything has been setup correctly.

The Adeona software is available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh. The Mac version has an interesting additional feature. It can create screenshots with a camera and add those to the tracking information.

The main application according to the developers is to recover a stolen notebook. The main problem with this kind of software based tracking is that it might help against a normal thief who keeps the notebook as his own and does not completely wipe the hard disks before using it. A clever thief would problem do that and install another operating system to start over. Some thieves may fire up the computer at least once to check for data like credit card information that they can take advantage of.

I guess some users will find different uses for this kind of software, like tracking their children, wifes, girlfriends, husbands to see what they are doing. Please note that you may end up with legal troubles if you are using the software for unlawful or unethical activities.

In my opinion though the loss of privacy does not justify the gain, because in the end it does not really matter that much if you know if someone read the email or visited the link you send him. Tracking users, no matter if its done in large scale by companies or in smaller scale by individuals, is not right. Not for this purpose anyone.

Enough of the ramblings. I’m the last to tell you what you can and cannot do on the Internet. I just wanted to make my position clear before posting the links to the following two websites.

Linkblip and UrlVi are two online scripts that convert links into urls that are tracked much like tinyurl but with tracking included. If someone clicks the links you will be notified by email if you have been using Linkblip or by accessing a page of statistics if you have been using UrlVi.

Both bring fourth another concern that i have. They disguise the original link which is a technique used by spammers as well. Instead of showing the link url www.ghacks.net they display http://lburl.com/dcgdy or http://urlvi.be/rus2k which do not reveal any information about the destination.

I would be very cautious about such a link even if a friend would be sending it to me. My first reaction would be to call, chat or reply to that friend asking what the link was all about.