Tracking and Advertising

Have you ever noticed that you get a ton of adverts on the Internet for things that you have looked at elsewhere ?
This is because when you visit sites, you leave behind a trail of information that advertisers can use to then bombard you with adverts about the exact same things.

It is very annoying.

Some time ago I was looking at a specific Lego set for a Christmas present. It was on sale on Lego.com, but I wanted to read the reviews. I bought it after reading several reviews and all was well, but following that, every page I visited would give me adverts for the same or similar sets. This might not have been too bad, had the intended recipient not been looking over my shoulder and pointed out how much they liked that set….

It was time to do something about this.

Many websites track you as you wander around their sites, in general they use third-party tools that allow for cross-site tracking. If you got to site A, B, C, D, the third party knows where you have been and what you have looked at. This information is available to advertisers.

There are a number of trackers, google are heavy trackers for example, but there are many of them out there.

Blocking all trackers has the effect of removing the targeted adverts. It reduces the targeting. Having a list of all domains that are used for tracking would allow you to block them at a router level assuming you can do this. But the list is HUGE.

In addition to this, there are a number (huge) of domains that actually serve adverts. Again, blocking these domains will prevent users from even seeing them.

So, what is needed are some lists, lists of trackers to block and lists of advertisers to block.

What you need is Pi-Hole

Pi-Hole is a local DNS server, but it does not give you DNS for the whole of the internet, it omits all of the sites that track you and serve adverts to you.

This is extremely cool, it runs on a Raspberry Pi and it just plain works. Any present my Pi-Hole implementation is blocking over 800k domains, which are responsible for 17.5% of all queries.

We get no adverts, no trackers and much faster loading speeds.

Because this is at our network level, it works for the TV’s. iPads and phones etc.