The Internet is not a private place. Every time you connect to a website, ads and beacons — both visible and invisible — attempt to follow your every move. They'll even take the anonymized information they collect and build a profile that other trackers can use to identify you as you surf the web. It's pretty bleak. Luckily, modern browsers are fighting back. While there are certainly better options than others, most browsers have privacy protections built in. If you know what you're doing, you can max out these protections and install some third-party boosters to retain some — if not most — of your privacy across the Internet. If you're curious as to how your browser stacks up to the competition, check out Cover Your Tracks. You might be surprised to find out that you’re not as anonymous as you thought. Cover Your Tracks is a project created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit digital rights group, and 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 series of trackers on your browser and measures which trackers are actually able to load. If your protections are strong, more trackers will fail to load. If they're not, well, trackers galore.
