Privacy: The Quiet Business of Being Followed
You are not being watched by one company — you are being cross-referenced by hundreds
Trackers do not need your name. They need enough fragments to recognise you again, and the ordinary web hands them dozens per page. This is what is collected, who buys it, and what turning it off actually changes.
What a tracker actually collects
Open a mainstream news article and your browser will typically contact between twenty and eighty other domains before the text finishes rendering. Most are not showing you anything. They are recording that this browser, from this rough location, on this device model, at this time, read this page.
Individually those fragments are meaningless. Combined across thousands of pages, they form a profile precise enough to infer income bracket, health interests, relationship status, employment changes and travel plans — none of which you ever typed anywhere.
Who buys the profile
The obvious buyers are advertisers. The less obvious ones are data brokers, who merge web behaviour with public records and loyalty-card data, then resell packaged segments. Those segments end up used for pricing, insurance modelling and, occasionally, in the hands of people running targeted fraud.
This is why privacy is not an abstract preference. A profile that says you recently searched for debt help is a shopping list for whoever wants to send you a convincing message about your finances.
What blocking changes
Blocking trackers at the network level, rather than inside one browser, means the same protection applies to apps, smart TVs and every device in the house. The profile stops being fed.
There is a pleasant side effect: pages that no longer load dozens of tracking scripts finish rendering considerably faster and use less mobile data. Privacy and speed turn out to be the same engineering problem.
Signs you may already be affected
- Ads that follow a single search across unrelated sites and devices
- Prices that differ depending on the device you shop from
- Recommendations that reference something you only spoke about near a phone
- Marketing from companies you have never contacted
What we reverse
- Tracker and fingerprinting requests blocked across every device, not just one browser
- A plain count of what was blocked, per week, with no jargon
- No profile of your browsing kept on our side — filtering happens without storing your history
- Faster page loads and lower data use as a direct consequence