its not all that bad now is it ?
It depends on what your idea of 'bad' is. From a privacy standpoint, yes, it is bad. Most people go about their daily lives being stalked by predatory big tech giants and surveillance capitalism fat cats who utilize your naivety and sheepish nature to exploit you for money, power and influence over your digital life. Emphasis on
your. It's like me spying on everything you do during the day but it being completely okay. You like to think you have a private life but really everything around you is designed to make you believe you have a private life, especially when it comes to your digital life, when in fact it's the opposite. The only big difference is we use legal wording and technicalities to get around it being illegal and unacceptable and we use things in our lives that pretty much give off the signal that we don't give a f*ck so long as we can consume to our hearts content.
adsence is a massive network of websites that all pay to get advertising on other websites and in the google search engine.
by becoming a customer (ie to get your site published in google) you normally get your site with an adsense add in it too.
each site with an adsense add is really just a tracking cookie for google.
all of googles services or affiliates work as one to track and tag its prey.
the best way to tackle this is to use some kind of ip shield be it a vpn (nord I recommend) or through tor or i2p and then
too have your browser delete cookies every time you restart it.
this way there is no ip to trace and no past cookie to verify.
This is true but VPN isn't enough. VPN only hides your IP address. It does not hide the unique fingerprint your browser exposes to the web each and everytime you go online.
And here is the paradox, the MORE you start to harden your browser and make it less prone to web tracking, the more unique the fingerprint. So even if you do have maximal configuration applied to your browser, your browser now sticks out like a sore thumb because all the tweaks you make will alter the fingerprint and make less generic and more unique. Out-of-the-box browsers will have a fingerprint that is the same seeing as default config will be the same for everyone who downloads the browser, installs it, but doesn't start tweaking it so in theory, the more prone to web tracking you are conversely the less you stand out with a unique fingerprint.
Try this website on for size, it's created by EFF who have been at the forefront of defending privacy and security online for decades. They have their own web tracker simulator which tests your browser to see how much info they can glean from it and how that translates to a fingerprint that determines how strong your protection is and how unique your fingerprint is;
Cover Your Tracks | EFF
Tracking has become so insidious it's very hard to avoid it, unless you go around with an absolutely intolerable web experience i.e pretty much all functionality disabled. And when I say functionality disabled, you would be limited to only HTML and CSS, which in today's modern world is pretty primitive when those technologies are the ONLY technologies used on a modern website. But as a positive, your web experience would be bloat, tracker, bullsh*t free for the most part. No CDNs, no JS which means no DOM storage etc, no cross-site cookies, no endless connections to endless websites etc.
And then surveillance capitalism as a whole is very difficult to avoid also. Here in the UK we have data protection laws that seem pretty robust but really don't actually do with the root issues. The current model is accepted and promoted, despite what you get told. There is money to be made, right? And the more people become just consumers they become just products in and of themselves which means gradually they become the cattle and whoever controls the environment controls the cattle. While it seems great getting access to instant messaging on Facebook it's not so great the prison walls get taller and the opportunity to escape gets smaller and smaller. What is sad is how most people only care about getting their primitive impulses met as opposed to seeking to have their entire being validated, accepted and valued. When YOU are the product, there is none of that. You are telling these predatory behemoths you don't care about yourself and like a rat in a science experiment, you just want to keep pressing the buzzer for a reward even though you aren't actually a f*cking rat but a human being with seemingly infinite potential and the ability to make your life way better and society better too.