Norton Anti-Track, Byte sized review
Norton Anti-Track is an app and browser extension for Windows PCs that, according to Norton, helps consumers “take control of their online privacy and keep their data private”.
In an age where it seems everything online is trying to keep tabs on your, Norton Anti-track seems to be the perfect antidote to hide your online identity from nefarious websites and trackers.
The program helps obscure your identity from tracking and fingerprinting attempts, with anti-fingerprinting technology, returning randomised dummy data back to the sites visited without sacrificing their PC’s speed or interrupting their browsing experience.
The lowdown on Norton Anti-Track and fingerprinting
Norton says the program also has anti-fingerprinting capabilities, which means it masks users’ unique identifiers including their IP address, location, device and operating system, font size, screen resolution and more, “helping prevent companies from creating a digital ‘fingerprint’ profile of the user to track and profile them”.
It also blocks cookie trackers and by blocking trackers means webpages will load faster. It costs $NZ64.99 for a yearly subscription.
I installed Anti-Track onto two browsers (Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome) on my desktop PC and while I knew that websites had trackers and other methods of farming personal data, I was honestly surprised at how many tracking programs a lot of the sites I visited had.
The results speak for themselves
In the month or so I’ve had Norton Anti-Track installed it has blocked 349 ads/analytics trackers and 18 shopping/e-commerce trackers from a prominent New Zealand news website, and 56 ads/analytics trackers from a European video game website that I frequently visit. In fact, it’s quite sobering seeing how much tracking is actually going on.
Since I installed Anti-Track, it has blocked 1,100 trackers (660 ads/analytics, 296 social media and 51shopping/e-ecommerce), all considered high to medium commonality.
If you want to reduce how much data companies and online websites are farming from you while you browse the net, Norton Anti-Track is a good tool to help with that.
Recommended.
