It’s pretty well known that many websites make an effort to track you online.  Even when your not on their site!  But, just how much tracking is going on?

We decided to do a “quick and dirty” look at a few popular websites to see just how many different trackers are deployed.  And, it’s not pretty.  In fact, it’s pretty ugly.

1. Drudgereport.com is by far the worst offender with at least 37 different cookies, trackers, advertising preference systems, etc. looking at you.
2. The Kansas City Star’s website, KansasCity.com has 13 peeking at what your doing.
3. KCTV5.com weighs in with 16. 
4. The popular humerous headline site Fark.com is a heavyweight with 19 different trackers.
5. And last, but not least, on our list is the popular fact checking site Snopes.com.  Which is using 28 different tools to see what your doing online.

Now, what happens when you block most (if not all) of these different little logical spy devices?  When tested on a 1.5Mbs DSL connection (fast enough to get results, slow enough to calculate differentials) we got some significant results.  Here’s what we did:

• Blocked all advertising trackers.
• Left open all trackers that serve a useful purpose (live support, security checking, etc.).
• Loaded a predetermined set of websites and a Firefox Macro Script that would load each page in succession.  After one page fully loads, it loaded the next.

We cleared the system Cache between each test run (and we did 10 runs of the tests).

Well, go figure!  You can surf much faster with all that “spying into what your doing stuff” turned off!  Significantly faster (tests ranged from 10-14% faster).  And, we wern’t leaking all kinds of personal data, surfing history, etc. out to other people we just think have no business tracking us.

Want to protect your personal and business information?  Give us a call or email.  We can not only block out the “bad actors” that are tracking you and your employees every online move, it’ll get you a little bit more out of your existing Internet connection speed too.