Browser: A trip to thegardenisland.com

Executive summary: It all started with a comment from one of my Facebook friends. "You guys must spend a lot on advertising. Everywhere I go I see ads for SANS." Hmmmm, interesting because I don't. But I had heard of targeted advertising. That got me interested in the mechanisms. Then there was the discussion with Glen Sharlun about digital cover and concealment and that got me thinking about defensive browsing. There are some very good reasons to seek cover and concealment.

Tonight I used my Firefox 43.0.3, with NoScript 2.9 and Ghostery. I cleared history. All I did was visit the local online Kauai newspaper. As you can see on the NoScript script block yellow bar on the bottom and the Ghostery tracker report there is some effort to track my browser. Let's look a bit closer at the scripts.

Took a screen shot from NoScript Options. Let's see what we can learn about these.

I am going to ignore Google, Alphabet knows everything anyway. Let's start with Outbrain.

Outbrain is designed to recommend the Garden Island's content to major sites, but what does that have to do with me? How could running a script on my box get their content onto CNN?

Adblade is pure play targeted ads. They find out what I am interested in then if I visit a web site that is also a Adblade customer, they can display targeted ads.

CleanPrint is ostensibly a formatting product, that does not sound so bad. Though there is the question of what do they format.

And last a news source. With BLOX I have different concerns. If you can tailor the ads I receive can you tailor the news I receive? If you decide from my browsing history that I am a republican, or a democrat or that holy grail, undecided, can you help me by uniquely controlling the news stories I see?