Across the globe, every single day, the equivalent of 90 years of HD video are disseminated around the internet every 24 hours. In bytes, that is the number 25 followed by nineteen zeroes. Information related to your preferences, your search patterns, your passions, and your relationships with others is collected by a variety of companies including social networks and search engines. Here are a few ways you can minimize the amount of data apps collect from you. Tracking Cookies – Cookies are a great way to keep track of who is connecting to a web server. The thing about cookies is that they are also a great way to track your activity outside of a website. Tracking cookies, as they are called, give a website access to your search and navigation statistics. If you do not feel comfortable with this much information circulating about you, you should clear your cookies often. To automate the clearing of cookies, you can use Private (or Incognito) mode in your browser. When it is closed, the entire cache and all the cookies will be wiped. Limiting Mobile Ads – It’s no secret that mobile apps have direct access to the phone’s internet traffic. While there’s nothing you can really do to entirely eliminate data collection from apps aside from uninstalling them, you can at least stop them from collecting that data for advertisements. Getting Off The Google Train – Google has become a behemoth in the world of tech products and applications. If you are using Android, there is no way to escape Google’s data collection since the operating system itself is written and distributed by the company. But again, the idea here is to minimize the amount of data you send. One of the ways you can do that is to use DuckDuckGo (which is often associated with data privacy) as your default search provider in your browser Become Invisible To Location Tracking – Smartphones are exceedingly good at tracking your daily habits. Location tracking helps companies determine what places are most relevant to you. If you are concerned about data privacy, this should be one of the first things you turn off. You can start by disabling your GPS. Source : https://www.maketecheasier.com/protect-yourself-from-mobile-data-collection/ |