59
How should I go about making an online identity that can't be tracked by advertisers?
(self.nostupidquestions)
this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
59 points (94.0% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35940 readers
1706 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Completely stopping tracking for shopping especially is gonna be impossible, but since you say "least trackable" I think there is some obfuscation you can do. Keep in mind, I'm by no means a security expert or anything, but general paranoia at the state of the internet has made me interested in trying to obfuscate my online identity for a while now (I say as I post on Social media...), so I've got some things I've found helpful
A simple easy thing is to start using browser containers for your different identities, which is built into Firefox. This way, details of one identity are less likely to leak into another, as in, what you search for in one identity isn't gonna end up in the shopping results of another. Related to this, I'd look at script blockers and other extensions that can stop trackers. My go to is NoScript but I get some people don't like it cause it's fiddly and can break sites. I've heard good things about Ghostify but haven't tried it myself. Getting started with NoScript way back, it was crazy to see how many different useless trackers and scripts were loading in the background that you don't even see and are apparently completely unnecessary to the functioning of a site.
Then I'd also recommend using a VPN. I love it when I see ads being served to me from completely random countries because of how often I change my location, confirms that whatever advertising service that for whatever reason slipped by my blockers still don't even know my general location.
And that's about it off the top of my head. If I can think of more I'll come back and edit my post.
I feel kinda silly about not using browser containers before.
Do you recommended any specific VPNs?
There are a lot of VPNs and a lot of opinions, so hard to recommend specific ones. There was a site I used a while back with a quiz that helped suggest VPNs, I think it was https://www.vpntierlist.com/ but I'm not sure. I seriously looked into ProtonVPN by whatever site it was' recommendation, but I ended up just renewing NordVPN, which I was already using, because of a special offer I got for ending my subscription in the first place due to privacy concerns. In the end, despite NordVPN having some potentially fishy business connections, it still suits my general needs, and with their various discounts feels like good value to me at least.