[PLUG] IP tracking

[Thomas Groman]

On Fri, 26 Jul 2019 12:26:07 -0700
Dick Steffens <dick at dicksteffens.com> wrote:

> On 7/26/19 12:13 PM, King Beowulf wrote:
> > On 7/25/19 10:21 PM, Dick Steffens wrote:  
> >> Is there a good place to read up on IP tracking by Google? Folks I
> >> know want to use Google Calendar. They are totally unsophisticated
> >> with regards to how Google tracks a user's IP address. I want to
> >> find some information I can cite to explain it to them.
> >>  
> > Dick,
> >
> > Literally EVERYBODY tracks your IP address. If they didn't, there
> > would be no way to access information on the internet. An IP
> > address is how internet information finds its destination and is
> > exactly analogous to your house address for receiving paper mail:
> > EVERYBODY knows your house address. It's a public record.  
> 
> I understand this part.
> 
> > The question is not "Do they track my IP access" but "Do they track
> > what internet sites and information I access from my IP address".
> > You can block a lot of this, use a VPN or proxy to hide your real
> > IP, but then you can't use "free" services like google calendar,
> > etc.  
> 
> Right. That's the part I want to read up on. How does Google track IP 
> addresses and the sites those IP addresses connect to.
> 

It's not really a matter of ip addresses but google uses a multitude to
track individuals across the internet. When you connect directly to
them such as using a google service, and many webmaster inject third
party javascript 'google-analytics' into their websites which phones
home to google on every visit even if your not connecting to google.
other ways are creating invisible 1x1 pixel gifs at unique links that
your browser loads. This is commonly exploited in email and it's why
most respectable mail clients say 'we have hid images to protect your
privacy'. other are the traditional methods using cookies and newer
methods like installing 'supercookies' by abusing HTML5 DOM storage.

If you want to get a good perspective on just how many third parties
are being phoned-home when you browse, A good plugin for mozilla based
browsers is called Umatrix. It's by a developer known as Gorhill.

You can fully mitigate yourself against this kind of creepy tracking,
but you will have to be ok with turning off a lot of browser features
and stop using sites that don't work with such features turned off.
However, one of the biggest ways is to stop using so called 'free web
services' such as gmail, google calender, facebook etc where they flat
out state they sell personal information. For example, there are plenty
of alternatives for google services that not only respect user freedoms
and privacy, but are better too. For email a great company with a
proven record of puttting their customer's privacy first is LavaBit.
They run their own hardware infrastructure in secure data centers and
developed their own software to encrypt your emails so they don't even
have access to them. When it comes to calendering, NextCloud is great
for this. It can provide both a web interface and CalDav services for
integration within Thunderbird, CalCurse-caldav, android, or anything
else than handles caldav. It also provides google-drive like
functionality, except allowing you to interact and share up-loadable and
modifiable resources to people who don't have a nextcloud instance
account. It allows for 100% self-hosting or you can pay a preexisting
company for an account on their instance.