🦅 The secret life of birds: The Motus Wildlife Tracking system has tagged nearly 50,000 birds, insects and bats with mini trackers to reveal their flight patterns. When an animal flies by one of 2,000 stations, its location is logged. A surprising and sad find? Only 40% of fledgling barn swallows in southern Ontario survive to migrate. ”Peep” at the data yourself.
20 websites most guilty of tracking what you do online
Thanks to the internet, modern lingo updates itself at the speed of light. Original terms pop up like weeds, and by the time you finally pick them up, you turn around to discover even more concepts have emerged, creating entirely new sentences that wouldn’t make sense in any other context. Case in point: “Cookies are stalking your every click and reporting back on your browsing history.”
That might sound weird at first; after all, in the real world, baked goods aren’t capable of spying on you. But over on the internet, “cookies” is another term for the tiny trackers that ad companies and data brokers use to watch over everything you do online. Tap or click here to understand what you’re signing up for when you accept cookies from a website.
Third-party cookies are so normalized that some of the biggest websites you visit may use them. Even worse, some websites will follow you after you’ve left; they’ll make a note of everything you do on other websites, as well. Here are some of the biggest culprits you need to watch out for.
Here’s the backstory
Although companies have used cookies to follow you around the web for years, Google’s cooking up a plan for a new way to track you. A while ago, Google said it would phase out its third-party cookies in Chrome by 2022. It announced a brand-new tracking system called FloC, which stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts.
Basically, FloC runs in your browser and rifles through your weekly activity. It keeps your user data in the browser and then dumps you into a group of people with similar histories. These groups are called “cohorts.” You’re assigned into new cohorts every week, based on what you looked up last week.
DO THIS TO PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY: 6 ways to stop advertisers from following you online
The whole point is to give you more anonymity. Google says its cohorts will have a ton of people, which makes it hard for third parties to identify you — but it’s also specific enough for ad targeting. It’s a big change, and it’s going to require a lot of careful reworking.
Back in June, Google pushed back the FloC release date to mid-2023. When the cohort feature finally hits, though, it could revolutionize the way companies track your data. In light of this announcement, a new study from pCloud unveils the internet’s most invasive websites. Researchers analyzed 88 websites to identify those that track you the most. According to pCloud, these websites follow you the farthest:
That’s right: Although Google plans to change the way it tracks you, right now, it’s collecting a boatload of data on your browsing habits. Tap or click here to see everything Google tracks about you and erase it.
Research shows Google uses some of “the most prevalent cross-site trackers on the internet”
Watch out! Clever Amazon delivery scam spreading all over the country
When was the last time you had an item delivered to your doorstep by Amazon? If your answer is recently, please read on. There is a new, clever scam targeting Amazon customers and people all over the U.S. are falling for it. Don’t be one of the victims! I’ll tell you what to look for.
20,000 car parts to build one Formula 1 car
Another mind-blowing stat? Each F1 car costs nearly $16 million to build. And get this: One team was still tracking all their parts in an Excel spreadsheet until a new boss introduced a modern tracking system. Sounds like they needed to be reading this free newsletter.