SAN ANTONIO – Whenever you go online, your every move is being tracked, and you have no idea what happens to all that information. More than 60 percent of Americans consider unauthorized digital tracking very intrusive, according to a survey conducted by Consumer Reports.
To help protect your personal information and privacy, Consumer Reports suggests four easy steps you can take to limit digital tracking:
Install an ad blocker, such as Privacy Badger. It blocks ads that come with tracking software.
Check your phone settings to see which apps are tracking your location, and turn off any that don’t need to know it.
If you go to an unfamiliar website that asks for your email address, go to a site such as 10minutemail.com, where you can get a temporary email address that self-destructs after you use it.
Be cautious when using Google. Google collects a tremendous amount of information about you, and it does that no matter where you go online, whether it's through Google Search, Google Maps, YouTube or Gmail. You can see just how much Google tracks if you look under “My account” and then “My activity.” There are also alternative search engines, such as DuckDuckGo that do not track their users.