Blog / Website Ads and Tracking

Lately it feels like every other newsletter I’ve written has been regarding ransomware. I keep a record of the topics I’ve written on and looking back over it, things aren’t actually that bad, but the topic of ransomware does come up a lot. That’s why this week I wanted to switch things up and talk about tracking and advertising on the web, a subject I mentioned it in passing a few weeks ago in an article about online privacy.

Simply put, there’s a lot more monitoring and tracking going on than most people realize. Personally I think being tracked and bombarded with targeted ads is annoying, but the problem goes beyond personal feelings about advertising. From an organizational perspective, the more people you have online, the more of your internet bandwidth is being wasted on ads being sent to them. From either perspective, minimizing ad traffic (by blocking everything you can) is worth the effort.

Let’s take a simple example like TRINUS’s own website, trinustech.com. There are no ads, but we do use four tracking scripts. At the top you’ll find icons for Facebook, Twitter, and other links. In order to make use of them, we have to use code provided by those organizations and we have to use it as is. Each of those code snippets contains code that tracks you when you visit those sites (as well as which site you came from, your browser and version, and bunch of other stuff). For comparison, the CBC website contains 14 trackers, and MSN’s contains 29. I even checked Politico’s main website wand found just under 40 trackers (for me, at any rate). How many trackers show up on a website will depend on where you are geographically as well as which browser you’re using. There may even be other factors about your setup that influences how many trackers are following you.

All of this information is being sent around the internet, collected, processed and sold. It’s everywhere and happens in the background. So what does this mean for an organization?

For one, all of this tracking information is being sent using your bandwidth and resources without request or authorization. You need your internet connection so that people can do their job, not to give Amazon another way to distract them. As a business owner you have a vested interest in preventing ad traffic from using your resources. Fortunately there are a couple of ways you can go about it.

1) Have a company DNS server that all devices are required to use.

Make sure this behavior is enforced with firewall policies so that you control which domains can be resolved within your network. This allows you to blacklist many of the advertising and tracking networks out there. This can be done without installing software on other machines, but you do need to make sure your DNS server is working properly.

2) Use software installed on the computers.

This usually takes the form of a browser plugin but it could also be some kind of proxy software that checks any traffic leaving the computer. Proxy software can cause communications problems and browser plugins only work with one browser.

Of the two options, using software allows you to filter more of the trackers than the DNS solution, so it’s the better option. It’s also the most involved since you’ll need to setup and install some kind of software on all your computers. In addition only, software only works on devices you install the it on, and other devices are still able access those tracking and ad networks. There’s no good reason to permit that.

Regardless, either solution will improve your overall internet speeds as most ads and trackers slow down how long it takes a page to display and removing them will improve load times. My personal recommendation is to use both options at the same time. This makes sure that even devices that you can’t install software on are prevented from going to most ad and tracking networks. I strongly recommend doing this in your home networks for exactly the same reasons.

I’ll close off today’s newsletter with a line from Shakespeare’s As You Like It: “A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.”

If you have any questions about blocking ads and trackers, please reach out to your TRINUS Account Manager for some stress-free IT.

By Kind, Courtesy of Your Friendly Neighbourhood Cyber-Man.