More Privacy Protection

More on privacy and those pesky Feedjit type sites.

I am still waging a battle against Feedjit and other sites such as Maploco, yes I do track my visitors, BUT the stats are not readily visible to everyone. I also have no problems with the owner of a site being able to privately track me while using their site. Public trackers are paramount to going into a store and over the door, for everyone to read it shows how you got to that store, the name of the town where you live, and where you went after you left the store. Not a pretty thought... I visit a LOT of blogs and other sites, I live in a very small community, I do not want the name of the town where I reside posted publicly on any website just because I visit the site, especially if it says where I came from and where I went after leaving. So I have tried many different ways to block these sites from being able to capture that information. Here is what I do now, and it seems to work.

I use Firefox as my browser, it allows me to use add-ons, one that is a favorite of mine is called "NoScript", this prevents active content from running on a site, if it's a site I trust, then I can click a button to allow active content to run, I can either choose individual content or allow everything to run. NoScript remembers what I have allowed and what I have blocked so I only have to mess with it the first time I visit a new site, after that it remembers. This has saved my butt from malicous or annoying content from messing with my computer. It's especially good when going to potentially "questionable" or high risk websites.

The next thing I added to my add-ons is called Adblock Plus, this also blocks things from running, though it's not proactive, you have to tell it what to block, and that's fine, I rely on NoScript to catch things first, then if something is particularly annoying (not necessarily an ad) then I run my cursor over it and if Adblock can block it, it shows a little tab that says "block", once I click on it, it's GONE, never to be seen again. I don't do this to block ads, as someone who uses advertising myself, I have no problem with ads, like I said, it works on more than just ads.

Next, I use a program called Avast, it's not part of the browser, it's an antivirus software and it's free. I have been using it for quite a while, when I noticed the other day a feature on it that allows you to block URLs. Well, I decided to try it out tonight, I put in *feedjit* and *maploco*, I was on a site that uses maploco, until now, nothing I did would block maploco from posting my town name. Until now... I put in those two URLs to be blocked, as soon as I refreshed the page, poof, the maploco icon was gone.

So, that is what I have so far, I will continue to look for problematic trackers that publicly show the name of my town when I visit and I will continue to look for ways to block them.



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Wretha,
properly pronounced wreetha (included for the text reader),

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