Last morning while surfing on the net, i came across an information worth sharing. You are already aware of the fact that when you visit a social network site or any e-mail service, a cookie is stored in your browser. Now the new information is that any third party website can also save your information shared on these social website.

Whenever you visit a site having a Like button, data including the address of the site you are visiting is sent to Facebook. No matter you are logged in or not, they have all the information they would need with your Facebook identity. With privacy issues at the forefront of technology news, it is vital to note that these social media tools track user’s behavior.

When you visit a website the data associated with it such as page title and time of visit, is recorded by web browser software as standard for a certain period of time. In many browsers the days limit is upto 90 days. Apart from the web browser software itself, third-party services can also record a user’s web browsing history. The worrying part of third-party tracking of your daily surfing is that there are many things companies can do with this information that isn’t so beneficial to its users.

Banner ads can track your browsing history. Each advertisement sets a cookie in your browser, and when you visit another site with ads served by the same provider, this cookie will be sent back with the referring URL. For example, if you visit facebook the tracking cookie will be set in your browser. Even after visiting Facebook, the tracking cookie will still be sent to Facebook when any Like buttons are loaded on other sites.

How to avoid this?

You can avoid this by deleting all browser cookies from the browser, or even surf in browser’s incognito/anonymous mode. Apart from that there are some other ways which can be effective in this regard.

Always empty your cookies while exiting from a web browsing session. Also you can manually set in your browser’s setting to automatically clear all your browsing cookies while exiting from the browsing session.

Web browsers play an important role in our use of computers, and even becoming the only way to interact with a machine, it’s obvious that the subject of privacy keeps coming up. And with privacy comes along the topic of how we are tracked on the web. While registering or doing business with a Web site, you should always review it’s privacy policy to see how it will use your information. You should never do business with any site that doesn’t have a clearly stated privacy policy.