Nearly every website today hides underneath dozens of entities and trackers that monitor your activities in the background. Google wants to bring more transparency to the experience and it’s doing so with a new Chrome add-on appropriately called Ads Transparency Spotlight.
Ads Transparency Spotlight is part of Google’s ongoing efforts to offer more transparency into its ads platform and inform users about how their data is being targeted online. Whenever you visit a webpage, you can simply launch the extension and it will sift through it to give you a rundown of all the displayed ads and the trackers working behind-the-scenes watching your every move.
“Our commitment to increase transparency and offer users more control goes beyond the ads Google shows,” Mike Schulman, vice president of Google’s Ads Privacy and Safety division, wrote in a blog post. “Due to the complexity of the digital ads ecosystem and the large number of entities involved, it’s typically not clear to users which companies are even involved in showing them an ad. To provide people with detailed information about all the ads they see on the web, we’re releasing a new tool called Ads Transparency Spotlight.”
The Chrome tool reveals a range of key details that can help you decide whether you feel comfortable visiting the particular website. That includes the names of the tech services that enable advertisers to run the ad, the upper-level platform (which is Google in most cases) that is hosting the ad, and all the corporations that have a presence in some form on the page such as third-party trackers and analytics providers.
On top of that, the add-on shares insight into which of your data these ads are based on. For instance, they can be tailored as per your interests or the topic of the website itself. However, Ads Transparency Spotlight is still in its early stages, and since it relies on a new ad scheme, it won’t always work as you’d expect it to.
In addition to this, Google is updating its ads, specifically the “Why this ad” button that reveals why a particular ad is being shown to you. Google says it’s adding a new feature called “About this ad” which will provide more details on the advertiser behind an ad.
Schulman claims that the search engine giant is actively working on offering a more private and safe experience online. “We’re also exploring a range of other approaches to improve user privacy while ensuring publishers can earn what they need to fund great content and advertisers can reach the right people for their products,” he added in the blog post.
A virtual private network (VPN) encrypts your internet traffic and routes it through a server run by the VPN provider. Websites see the VPN server’s IP address instead of yours, and you can get around geo-blocks, censorship, and ISP throttling. The best VPN services are paid, but there are still a handful of free options that do the job well.
Most free VPNs come with a hidden cost, because running servers isn’t cheap and a company that doesn’t charge you has to make its money somewhere else. Many do so by logging your browsing activity and selling it to advertisers, while others flood you with ads and track you across apps.
A stocked computer cache may be convenient for logging into and out of go-to sites in seconds flat, but a major buildup of these tracking codes could significantly impact your PC’s performance. If you’ve noticed that your PC has been running rather slow of late, or you’re using a new browser and don’t know how to clear its cache, we’ve got you covered with the following guide.
If you’re looking to clean up your Gmail inbox, but you don’t want to delete anything permanently, then choosing the archive option is your best bet. Whenever you archive an email, it is removed from your inbox folder while still remaining accessible. Here’s how to access any emails you have archived previously, as well as how to move such messages back to your regular inbox for fast access.