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Please note:
Feel free to use the copy below on your website/blog.
Facebook owes
the world an apology, and yet its having been exposed
tracking, collecting, and sharing far more personal data
on its users than previously thought has shed light on
the broader, thorny problem facing modern internet
users: how best to protect ourselves in a world in which
your life is worth less to companies than the
information stored about you? How do we strike a
comfortable balance between securing our digital lives
and enjoying current and future technologies capable of
bringing us together, better anticipating our needs, and
offering greater convenience shopping, learning,
viewing, gaming, and interacting online than ever
before?

To address
these issues, iolo technologies® offers Privacy
Guardian™ anti-tracking software, with a set of features
uniquely suited to address the multiple challenges to
online privacy today.
Cookie-based tracking is not the worst of it
Privacy Guardian does not block site content that
contains cookies. This crude method of stopping
ad-trackers often results in blocking legitimate
website content. Instead, Privacy Guardian scrambles the
data digital fingerprinting scripts use to try and track
you. This is a far more sophisticated form of online
tracking than cookies-based tracking.
Digital fingerprinting can acquire vast amounts of
information about you by studying your computer's
configuration and your online habits. This info
includes: your online purchases, income, debt, videos
watched, web searches, vacation habits, marital and
child status, and much more.
The mining of such specific information about you can
have harmful real-world consequences. Imagine being
denied credit because a company has secretly collected
data that suggests--however inaccurately--that you are an
irresponsible shopper.
Not all cookies are bad
Unlike Privacy Guardian, ad-blocking software hides
targeted ads by blocking scripts--but it does not
actually remove tracking cookies from your computer.
Straight-out blocking, as opposed to deceiving, tracking
scripts can affect how sites look and function,
including leading to website breakage. And blocking
scripts to vanquish all cookies may not be the most
favorable option for you for one simple reason: many
people like seeing ads for items they have taken an
interest in previously, or that are related to other
items they have recently purchased. After all,
the argument goes, if websites are going to place
ads in front of me, they may as well be relevant to my
needs and interests.
Privacy Guardian lets YOU decide how often or rarely you
see such targeted advertising. With Privacy Guardian's
automated cookie clearance--across all your browsers at
once--you can schedule regular purges of the information
used to make those ads appear. Privacy Guardian even
allows you to “whitelist” specific websites from your
scheduled cookie clearance. Regular cookies and browsing
data clearance, combined with the anti-fingerprinting
methods Privacy Guardian deploys, gives you nearly total
control of whether, when and how you are tracked online.
Works well with a VPN
Privacy Guardian is the perfect complement to a virtual
private network (VPN). After all, VPNs do not offer
total privacy protection on their own. VPNs mask your
location by creating a false IP address so it looks as
though your computer is browsing from a different
location than your physical one. This protects your
computer from any snooping your ISP may try to do. But
after the VPN server, your traffic flows outside of the
encryption, where most of the digital fingerprinting
scripts are injected into the web pages you visit, so
you can still be tracked even when your VPN is enabled.
Privacy Guardian is there on the other side, to confound
these scripts with modified data they can't use on you.
Keep private searches private
Privacy Guardian's Private Search bar offers yet another
level of online privacy protection. Many search engines
store, share, and even sell what you search for online.
By using the Private Search feature in Privacy Guardian,
you can browse the web without fear of anyone collecting
info on what you're searching.
Incognito mode is insufficient
Privacy Guardian also thwarts tracking attempts that get
past incognito mode. Incognito mode prevents local
storage of browsing data, so items like cookies, search
history and autofill are not saved. But incognito mode
does nothing to prevent the loading of tracking scripts
used by data-mining entities to digitally fingerprint
you. This, again, is the process of creating a detailed
profile of you by collecting countless metrics from your
web browser--a process unabated by incognito mode.
As a test, you can enable Privacy Guardian while
browsing in incognito mode and still see the many
tracking attempts detected by Privacy Guardian.
Free browser plug-ins won't cut it
Many people wonder why they should pay for premium
browser privacy protection when free plug-ins are
available.
This article examines several free products on the
market, finding each wanting for different reasons.
These include breaking websites by blanket content
blocking based on a blacklist, masking only limited
aspects of one's digital fingerprint, and in at least
one case, the plug-in itself feeding your personal data
to the advertising industry!
How Facebook tracks you
Facebook's purpose is to harvest the personal data of
its users to give to companies to better target them as
customers. Much of this data is given to Facebook
voluntarily: Facebook uses quizzes, surveys, games like
Farmville, and the personal data you willfully provided
at sign-up to gather info about you. Privacy Guardian
cannot stand in the way of this free information
exchange if you have opted into it.
However, the collecting of personally identifiable
information through Facebook's Like, Share and Send
buttons is counteracted through Privacy Guardian's
fingerprint obfuscation and cookie and browser data
clearing functions. Once cookies are removed and a Facebook user's digital fingerprint is masked, no
correlation can be made between the user's behavior on a
website and their Facebook profile.
On top of this, Facebook operates
a massive hidden tracker network outside of Facebook,
much of it through the
Facebook Retargeting Pixel. On third-party sites
like pharmacies and others where you don't expect Facebook to be tracking you, it in fact is. The shadow
profiles Facebook creates from people's browsing
histories apply even to non-Facebook users. (And note
that Google tracks users across even more third-party
sites than Facebook).
Once again, it's Privacy Guardian to the rescue:
fingerprinting scripts used in this effort are thwarted,
and ad-trackers stopped via automated cookie clearance
and easy, multiple-browser data erasure within the
Privacy Guardian UI.
Stay an informed user
Privacy Guardian goes a long way to safeguarding your
online experience as modern data-mining worsens. To
further protect your privacy while using Facebook,
revisit your Facebook privacy settings regularly to be
sure your understanding of what you're keeping private
matches what, in fact, you are keeping private. And
perhaps think twice about clicking through Facebook
links to every quiz site that asks which type of marine
mammal or Happy Days character you are.
For more information on protecting your privacy online
and in other aspects of your digital life, read about
Privacy Guardian and the other tools and features within
iolo's
comprehensive performance, protection, and privacy
software Phoenix 360™.
An Overview of Available Online Privacy Features
|
FEATURES |
AD-BLOCKERS |
INCOGNITO MODE |
VPNS |
FREE PLUG-INS |
PRIVACY GUARDIAN |
|
Alerts you when and which entity is trying to
track you |
|
|
|
|
✓ |
|
Thwarts digital fingerprinting |
|
|
|
|
✓ |
|
Disrupts Facebook Pixel tracking |
|
|
|
|
✓ |
|
Clears cookies and browsing history |
|
✓ |
|
|
✓ |
|
Stops
targeted ads |
✓ |
✓ |
|
✓ |
✓ |
|
Won't
block legitimate web content |
|
|
✓ |
|
✓ |
|
Does
not collect, store, or sell user data |
|
✓ |
✓ |
|
✓ |
|
Private search bar deletes your searches |
|
✓ |
|
|
✓ |
|
Masks
your location from your ISP |
|
|
✓ |
|
✓ |
Phoenix 360 Link
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Performance for Your Digital Life.
|
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