To get some sense of what a site might “know” about you, visit What every Browser knows about you by Robin Linus and Cover Your Tracks from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Most web browsers reveal at least some basic information to sites you visit. Human rights activists, academics, and innovators may wish to keep internet browsing activity unknown to officials.īut a fully private web browsing experience that reveals no information whatsoever about you as you browse can be difficult to achieve. In some countries, government agencies actively monitor and/or restrict access to information on the internet. Each step in that process represents a potential place your privacy might leak information.įourth, many people also prefer privacy from governments. Your browser relies on your local network connection (often over Wi-Fi), which is routed through your internet service provider, then over the internet to a destination website. Third, you likely also want privacy over the connections from your device to a website. That’s because activity and ad trackers often operate across multiple sites. At one point or another, you might have noticed that advertisements for an item you’ve searched for now appear on several sites you visit. Second, you could mean that you want privacy between sites you visit.

More concerning is the scenario where a person in an abusive relationship, for example, may not want someone else in the household to know they’ve searched for help. You might not want the fact that you searched for a gift for someone in your household to be discovered by someone that shares access to your computer. Most people can quickly identify at least four different types of privacy that may be a concern.įirst, privacy may mean privacy from other people with access to your device. You can take several steps to protect your privacy as you browse-but when we use the word privacy, we need to clarify what we mean.

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