The web portals we visit on a daily basis collect an impressive amount of information about us. Here’s how to check what data they have on us
In an age when not a day goes by without at least one Android or iPhone app being discovered that spies on users, some have already forgotten that data tracking originated several years before the app boom: it goes back to the dawn of the web.
And since those times there’s a technology that we’ve brought with us and that even today the vast majority of websites still use to know who we are and what we do: cookies. Behind the sweet name (cookie means cookie), there are files that are stored on our computer (but also mobile device, if we surf from smartphones or tablets) that sites use to track us. Through cookies it is possible to know if a user has already been on a site, save his preferences for that site but also track many other behaviors. Like apps, websites also ask our device for a lot of hardware usage permissions, which are not always justified.
How to check who’s spying on you on Chrome
Starting from by far the most used browser in the world, namely Chrome, to know which sites collect information about us we can do two things. The first is to navigate to a specific site and click on the padlock icon that is located right before the site’s URL address. After clicking on the icon we choose Settings from the menu that appears and we’ll be shown a long list of things that that site can do: from using the computer’s audio, which is a legitimate thing if it has to play content, to accessing the camera, which instead is something much more suspicious. From the same screen we can disable these permissions. If instead we want to see which sites have deposited a cookie on our device we have to go to the menu with the three lines in the top right and choose Settings > Advanced > Cookies. Here we can also delete the cookies that do not convince us too much.
How to check who is spying on you in Firefox
Not much different work to do on Mozilla Firefox to know what sites collect information about us. Always to the left of the URL of a site we’ll find an icon, usually depicting an “i” as “information”. Clicking on it will open a window to see what permissions the visited sites have asked and obtained, and we can adjust them with the same basic logic already described: if we do not understand why a site asks us access to something, then do not give it. To delete cookies in Firefox we have to click on the menu with the three horizontal lines and choose Options > Privacy and security > Cookies and website data. Here we can click on the button “Manage data…” through which the window will open showing us all the cookies present and allowing us to disable or delete them.
How to check who is spying on you on Safari
If you browse with Safari on macOS, you can see the permissions of a site and change them by opening the Safari menu and clicking on “Settings for this website”. You’ll see options for camera, location, and microphone access, for example, and a setting to block pop-up windows. If you want to change the settings you’ll have to hold your mouse over them and wait for the pop-up menu to open. If you want to look at the cookies recorded by Safari you have to go to Preferences > Privacy. Here you’ll find the option “Block cross-site tracking” which, in practice, prevents tracking of a user’s behavior when switching from one site to another. Also from this window you can block all cookies indiscriminately, while to access individual cookies we have to click on “Manage Websites Data”.