Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Google has secret webpages that feed your personal data to advertisers, report says

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

Each of us has an individual web page somewhere on the internet. The page is blank, but it's unique to your digital fingerprint, and when web-based advertsiements display on your browser, they send a request to this secret web page, which is logged and tracked. It's a widespread practice and is known as cookie syncing, or cookie matching, and it's a way for advertisers to follow your every move even if you have cookies disabled. A Google developer page on cookie matching describes the process, which is used to support real-time bidding for ad placement. If you use an ad blocker like Ublock Origin, these requests are blocked, but if you don't, or if you whitelist websites, you're being tracked. More: MediaPost, Brave (more) (which provides proof), Towards Data Science (describes the fingerprinting for anonymous ussers),

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: May 03, 2024 7:44 p.m.

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