GREENSBORO, N.C. — The next time you're surfing away on the internet in the privacy of your own home by yourself you might want to think about who's watching what you're doing online. And there's a new tool on iPhones to help you find out.
In Safari click the squares in the bottom right corner to open a new tab. Then click the plus sign in the bottom left corner, and at the bottom of the screen will be a privacy report.
2 Wants To Know’s Ben Briscoe’s report said Safari had prevented 101 trackers from profiling him in the last week.
Click on that to see which websites are tracking you. Ben’s top ones were doubleclick.net and googletagmanager.com. Plus Google Analytics and Google.
The new tool highlights companies we've warned you about for years. Back in 2018, CBS News and 2 Wants To Know reported Google says it had access to "70-percent of credit and debit card transactions in the United States". Along with Facebook and others, it also monitored much of what we're doing across the web. Using hidden tracking technologies the companies could see many of the pages you and people connected to you were visiting. That let them better tailor their ads. According to the author of one study back then, Google had trackers on 76 percent of websites. Facebook watched us on 23 percent of sites.
On an Android, Google lets you turn on “Do Not Track” by following these steps:
- On your Android device, open the Chrome app .
- To the right of the address bar, tap More Settings.
- Tap Privacy and Security.
- Tap Do Not Track.
- Turn the setting on or off.
On an iPhone, you can browse in incognito mode.