Today I was putting together an online poll for some friends, to figure out when we can have our next virtual game night. I was using Doodle, a web site that has a quick and easy (and free!) way to create polls. But the site didn’t work, because it told me I was blocking ads. I turned off my ad blocker so I could finish my poll, and the software I use to block tracking scripts (Ghostery) went haywire. Check out the purple column on the right:
68 trackers! This single web page is using that many different scripts and sites to track me and deliver ads. Holy smokes.
For those people who think they’re “anonymous” on the internet, or wonder how Amazon and Facebook can suddenly display an ad for something they were looking at on a completely different site, here you go. And this is just for a simple little poll…