I Used Cover My Tracks to See Who Was Following Me Online and Wow

The internet is not a private place. Every time you connect to a website, ads and beacons — both visible and invisible — try to track your every move. They even take the anonymous information they collect and create a profile that other trackers can use to identify you as you browse the web. It’s pretty grim.

Luckily, modern browsers are fighting back. While there are certainly better options than others , most browsers have privacy protection built in. If you know what you’re doing, you can make the most of this protection and install some third-party enhancers to preserve some (if not most) of your online privacy.

If you’re curious about how your browser stacks up against the competition, check out Cover Your Tracks . I tried it and was surprised to find that my super-private settings weren’t as anonymous as I thought.

What is “Covering Your Tracks”?

Cover Your Tracks is a project created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit digital rights group, that aims to educate users on two key metrics: how unique their browser is, and how effective their tracker blockers are. The site pretends to load a number of trackers into your browser, and measures which trackers are actually able to load. If your protections are strong, no more trackers will load. If not, well, there will be a lot of trackers.

The site will load fake trackers like the following:

• https://trackersimulator.org /?action=tracking_tally& ad_url =123456

• https:// eviltracker.net /?action=tracking_tally& trackingserver =123456

• https://do-not-tracker.org /?action=tracking_tally&random=123456

The first link acts like an ad you might encounter on any random website. If your browser blocks the “ad,” it passes the test. The second link pretends to be an invisible beacon (or tracker). If your browser blocks the “beacon,” it passes the test. Finally, the third link acts like a domain that complies with the EFF’s Do Not Track policy . If your browser unblocks the domain’s scripts, it passes the test. (Why unblock scripts at all? According to the EFF, so few sites voluntarily opt out of tracking visitors that it’s worth unblocking ads on those sites to reward them.) Partial credit goes to browsers that allow an ad or beacon to load but block the associated cookies: Allowing an ad or tracker means you can be tracked, but blocking cookies means the tracker will likely be able to identify you.

These trackers are only effective if they have some idea of ​​the profile they’re tracking. That’s where browser uniqueness comes in: Cover Your Tracks looks at your browser fingerprint and compares it to its database of recently scanned browsers. It then generates a uniqueness score — the more unique your fingerprint, the harder it is to track you across websites. Cover Your Tracks anonymously collects and stores browser data like your time zone, screen resolution, system language, and system platform, among other data points, to compare with other users’ browsers.

What grade did I get?

I’m not necessarily a privacy fanatic, but I like to protect my privacy wherever I can online. So I use Safari whenever possible, with all the privacy settings I can turn on . This includes hiding my IP address from trackers and websites, and preventing cross-site tracking. I combine this with an ad blocker (I use AdGuard, but would love to see uBlock Origin make a Safari extension) for a private, ad-free web experience.

These minimal steps seem to have paid off — at least according to Cover Your Tracks. After running my browser through it, the site concluded that I have robust protection against web tracking. Tests confirmed that my browser blocks tracking ads and invisible trackers, which is reassuring. The bad news, however, is that my current settings don’t protect me from fingerprinting, a practice in which trackers create a profile to make it easier to identify you online. Cover Your Tracks said my browser has a unique fingerprint among the more than 250,000 browsers they’ve tested over the past 45 days, meaning I stand out like a sore thumb online. While the trackers my browser blocks won’t be able to see me, the ones my browser lets through will, and they’ll know it’s my browser reading this article or watching this video.

I’m actually quite surprised by this: Safari has “enhanced tracking and fingerprinting protection” which I keep enabled for all browsing. The fact that Cover Your Tracks thinks I have a completely unique browser profile is a little disturbing, to say the least.

When I tried the test in my Firefox browser — with all privacy protections enabled, coupled with uBlock Origin — it showed the same result, except for the fingerprint test. Unlike Safari, my Firefox browser is virtually unique: one out of 125,883 browsers has the same fingerprint as mine, which I think means my Firefox browser is twice as anonymous as my Safari browser, although that doesn’t say much.

How to avoid identification on the Internet?

So, it turns out that any trackers that break through my browser’s defenses can see my entire browsing experience. That’s not great. Where do you go from here?

Unfortunately, it’s complicated. Fingerprinting is pretty hard to avoid because the more trackers you disable, the worse the web gets. As the EFF explains , it’s a bit counterintuitive, but after a certain point, you stop blocking trackers that exist to track you, and you start blocking the elements that make websites work. If you disable JavaScript, you can stop a website from tracking you, but you may not be able to use it at all. On the other hand, using too many protections can actually inadvertently identify you, since trackers and sites see that you’re the only one blocking everything all the time.

There is no single way to ensure complete privacy online, but according to the EFF, the simplest ways to combat fingerprinting include the following:

• Use Tor to browse the web, as the browser has a number of advanced anti-tracking features.

• Use extensions for hardcore privacy (EFF recommends Privacy Badger and Disconnect or NoScript if you use Firefox. Unfortunately, neither of these are compatible with Safari.)

However, I tried running the test using Tor with the “Safer” privacy settings enabled and got the same unique browser rating as with Safari. So I cranked the settings to “Safer,” which, among other things, disables JavaScript on all websites. I tried running the test again and it broke the website. You may actually need to give up a little privacy to use the Internet at all.

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