Are you really safe on the internet?

overview

This blog post will cover a few aspects you must consider when surfing the internet. It can be just scrolling through social media feeds or surfing different websites.

What do they use to track you? and how does it affect you?

As in real life, to track a person first there must be a method to identify a particular person from others. We are all familiar with using/having ID cards, social security numbers, and passports which can be used to authenticate ourselves to others. These are a few ways that they track you and identify you on the internet.

1. Your Activities and likings

   Have you ever wondered how Facebook shows advertisements of the exact type of dresses you like?

   How do they nail exactly what you like to watch whenever you come to the feed?

Your likings and behaviors can be used to uniquely identify you as a person. As you spend more time on social media or websites, they can gather information about your likings and your behavior. In the modern era such collection of data is like gold to such organizations, so they can sell them to third parties to send target advertisements. At first, it may not seem like it can cause much harm, but in case of a data breach, things can go horribly wrong. In most cases, they use cookies for this and I'm looking forward to coming up with an article dedicated to cookies.

1. Your IP addresses and MAC address.

   As we all have personal Identification numbers, even our devices have unique addresses (MAC). But in many cases, we don't use MAC addresses to identify ourselves on the internet. We use an IP address for that. It is given by the ISP and it is used like addresses in our houses.

2. Things you post

   Do you know that the pictures you take or documents you create have metadata that contains location information, device information, etc. Many social media platforms get rid of such data when you upload pictures but many other websites do not bother with such things. This can lead to unexpected information leaks where someone can use it to cause harm or gather information about you. When it comes to sharing pictures, someone can find a pattern out of it.

   For example, if you post a story in the gym and you do it daily as a habit, someone can see that you are usually not at home at that particular time or you are most probably at the gym at that given time. A burglar might use that time to break into your house. This is just a small explanation of how things you post can be used against you.

What can you do?

• Think twice before you post something.

• Manage cookies.

• Use anti-tracking mechanisms provided by the browsers.

• If you need to post a picture publicly, make sure it can't be traced back to cause harm to you.

This is just a basic article about how organizations can track you on the internet and a few things you should follow to protect yourself. I'm hoping to come up with more detailed and technical articles regarding this and follow up to keep updated with them.