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How do third parties track you across the web? Each time you visit a website, your computer makes a request to that website’s server.

But in the background, it may also make dozens or even hundreds of requests to other third-party servers, many of which may be trackers. <THREAD> A desktop connects to https://website.com. This is shown as a HTTP request, processed by a first-party server, and delivering the requested content. A separate red line shows that the HTTP request is also forwarded to a third-party server, given an assigned ID, and a tracking cookie that is included in the requested content.
The most common tool for this kind of tracking is a cookie: a small piece of text stored in your browser, associated with a particular domain.

Cookies were invented to help site owners determine whether a user had visited their site before, which makes them ideal for tracking.
Cookies are always unique, and they normally persist until a user manually clears them. Cookies are always available to trackers in unmodified versions of Chrome, but third-party cookies are no longer available to many trackers in Safari and Firefox.
Read 5 tweets
Just in time for #CyberMonday holiday shopping, today we are launching a new paper taking a deep dive into the technical methods and business practices that drive corporate surveillance. #BehindTheOneWayMirror eff.org/wp/behind-the-…
What information do trackers use to figure out who you are? How do advertisers track your activity across multiple devices? How does your data end up in the hands of data brokers you’ve never heard of? Our new paper covers these questions and more.
And it’s not just advertisers and data brokers. Business, concert organizers, airlines, political campaigns, and others have adopted tracking techniques as well, with unsettling consequences for regular people.
Read 6 tweets

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