People are often in disbelief that I WILL spend the extra 10 seconds to refuse all cookies. Don't track me to advertise to me!!
People are shocked I take the time to remove all the litter at the end of a url. Remove everything starting with "?si=..." Don't track me!!
Email had a link? Remove all the utm_campaign=... bullshit. Don't track me!!
Install an adblocker. "this action requires certain cookies turned on" Oh yeah? In all but the most necessary circumstances, that's too bad! Guess I won't be using your website then! Goodbye. Don't track me!!
Have you ever been sent a post from say, tiktok or instagram that says "join [x person] who has shared this post with you on our app"? That's what the "?si=" does.
Let's say a friend sent you a funny post about guitarists on Instagram. When they shared it, it got sent with the IG version of the tracker, instagram dot com/reel/whatever?igsh=trackingID. When you click their "igsh"-included link, it tells instagram that your friend shared the link, and you clicked the link. It has linked your identifiers (your IP address, your account if you log in, general things about you like your location (from IP), the time of day) and key interest points from the reel that was shared to you that you clicked on, to draw an "anonymised" profile of you. It also links you to the person that sent you the link, telling IG (or others) that you both are "in the same network". (This allows them to possibly advertise things that may be "shared interests" between you.)
Next, cookies. Allow Instagram to use cookies? Sure. Now what happens is, say you close the instagram page and open a new browser tab and go to google. Cookies allow "tracking history across the web". This means IG is allowed to talk to websites you went to after visiting them and exchange information. So when you go to Google, instagram knows you're on Google. Further, IG can (and does) perform "handshakes" with the next site, which might futher request information about what you saw before coming to their website. Instagram tells google you're a person from [city] who has just been looking at reels about guitars. Voila! Suddenly you're seeing music related ads.
This is the equivalent of walking out of a grocery store and having a strange man follow you silently to go back to the shop and report on where you went after doing your groceries. Not just the next shop you went to: every other place you went to, and everything you looked at in every other place, for the whole week.
The supposed purpose of this is when you next enter the grocery store, they can have your milk of choice in the aisle closest the entrace for you. So they say. Why does my grocer need to know I like guitars? They have nothing to offer me that could be remotely to do with guitars. But maybe they can put up an ad on aisle 1 about an ally store of theirs that has paid to put up advertisements in their shop.
When a business does it, it's seen as a more aggressive KYC ("know your customer"). If an individual did it, it would legally be called stalking.
On the principle of laziness, we are handing over so much more information about ourselves than most shops would have any use for in a million years. When I post on instagram, it shows me the countries, age range and genders of my audience. Personally, this information is of no use to me. It is being compiled for me anyway. In CASE I ever need to blast ads that overlap with the "interests" of my audience. And even when it's far more than I need, the pathways are already in place: you don't need your own henchmen to track your audience for you. Instagram has all the big data mining tools to do it for you.
Stop handing over your shit to them! Use an adblocker! Clean those links! (look into firefox extensions called things like "clean urls" or "remove tracking") Remove those tracking IDs! It doesn't matter whether the profile they build of you is truly "anonymous" or not. If they have everything bar my physical body through the internet, am I truly anonymous? If they can pinpoint me down to my location, my daily internet usage habits, can draw a profile of my age, gender, job area and much more using "educated guesses" (big data/models), then am I truly anonymous?
Advertising is not benign! It is surveillance! Take out 10 seconds from your online life to build a few good habits. They go a long, long way. You should be actively hostile to survei advertising.
