This is a text automatically translated from Italian. If you appreciate our work and if you like reading it in your language, consider a donation to allow us to continue doing it and improving it.
We return with our favorite formula, that of practical examples, speaking of navigation. A question that many may have asked: Am I being watched while I browse? And no, we're not talking about dark strong powers. Let's talk about observation, somehow Invisible, of the movements we make within a website. First of all, we invite you to visit the site below and play around with it, possibly with the audio on!
•Funny, right?
There is nothing particularly complicated or secret. It's a relatively simple site and uses the tools most sites use these days. Even if many don't know what we're talking about, all this can be done thanks to javascript 1.
Curiosity: the author of JavaScript is Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla and current CEO of Brave.
Javascript is a programming language used massively within modern websites. We use it too, to be able to view the menu and search. However, it is not essential to have it enabled to visit our site.
Thanks to this tool, however, it is also possible to learn about an infinite number of interactions 2. As you may have seen from the site clickclickclick.click our every action can be recognized in some way. Anyone who manages a website can in fact know easily how long you stay on the page, where you click, how much you click, how long after you click. If your mouse is up or down, if you go fast or slow. And so on.
On the site clickclickclick.click there are also some achievements (tests/missions) nice to understand the infinity of things that can be discovered.
As defend oneself?
The only way to escape this, so to speak, control is to disable scripts. With the extension NoScript (not recommended to non-experts) or simpler with Brave by enabling the “block script” option.
It goes without saying, however, that a very high percentage of websites do this it will break. However, we do not fall into the opposite error either. JavaScript it is not absolute evil, it can be useful. In our opinion, however, a site should not break when you disable it, it should at least be navigable.
As was pointed out to us 3, it seems correct to point out that websites often run third-party JavaScript, i.e. they do not come from the site itself but from different sites. And this is definitely both a security and privacy issue. For this reason, one of the most interesting solutions is certainly to automatically block third-party scripts with uBlock Origin or using more complete tools such as NoScript. Also Brave It does not load third-party scripts even if those already considered safe are enabled and loaded by default (to prevent too many sites from breaking).
We then discovered that there is no painless solution if you are not willing to take care of the scripts to execute or not during navigation every time. Situation almost impracticable for most people. But we like the idea of make you aware of what happens on the internet while we surf. In fact, most of our articles talk about exactly this awareness.
Among other things, perhaps it has little to do with it, but we are reminded that in China they manage to identify people watching their walk 4. We will also get to identify someone thanks to as do you use the computer?
Industry experts will forgive us for the excessive simplifications, our goal is to disseminate in simple words. We deliberately don't get into overly technical topics! ❤
•Hoping to have made you a little more aware of the importance of protecting your privacy online and how simple it is to spy on someone's actions. If you like this type of article you can find others in our section dedicated to practical examples.
- https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript[↩]
- https://www.html.it/articoli/interazione-ed-eventi-in-javascript/[↩]
- Report on Codeberg[↩]
- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-police-walking-gait-technology-surveillance-ai-suspect-a8797836.html[↩]
Join communities
If you have found errors in the article you can report them by clicking here, Thank you!