Every. Click. Tracked. Recorded: Rob Braxman
Summary
Transcript
This is something that I would bet the normal person doesn’t even comprehend. Today on the Internet, practically every click is tracked. Every click. This is true for most people though. Those who have advanced privacy knowledge can get around this, which I’ll tell you about later. And some of us also intentionally allows our clicks to be tracked. We’ll get some of the more advanced concepts later if you stay tuned to the video.
But for the rest of you, aren’t you shocked? Well, of course not, because most of you don’t care. It is quite a blatant attack on privacy that the typical person has come to accept this as normal. Is it ever normal for every click to be tracked and recorded? Is there anything you do on the Internet that perhaps you think should be private? For me, that’s pretty much everything.
But I bet even for some of you, nothing to hide people, there are things you’d rather not make public. What I will first tell you in this video is how every click is tracked. Because it is not obvious how this is done yet. It is surprisingly simple to understand after I explain it. There is so much information about each and every one of you and what you do on the Internet.
Someday you will be interested to know how they collected that information. But if you want to learn about it now, stay right there. Today, the big tech tracking of what you do on the Internet has some technical terms that show how sophisticated the tracking is. One way of tracking is called probabilistic tracking and the other one is called deterministic, and some of these two methods are combined to create a complete profile of your identity.
There are also different entities doing tracking, and for now, I’ll leave government out of this, though you can assume they can require big tech to give them any information they want. Ad companies, of course, are a big source of tracking, though to be honest, their reach is more limited and they’re not exactly the big threat to fear. Spoiler alert the big threat to fear is Google, and what they can do exceeds what people imagine they can do.
But we’ll slowly explain all that. Ad companies track you by leaving little trackers on your browser called cookies. When you go into any website that has ads. Now, this has gotten sophisticated now because they can track you even without these cookies, using a technique known as browser fingerprinting. The idea behind this is that over time, the tracking entity will recognize you even as you go through many websites.
These same ad companies often appear in multiple websites, so they can connect your actions on most of them. Now, these companies don’t know exactly who you are they are guessing you are the same person based on fingerprinting information they’ve gathered from your device. Their logic is simple. The algorithm says I’ve seen you before so it is probably you, but it is not 100%. Well, if it is probably you, then that’s good enough to pop out ads of cars every website.
If you’re found visiting cars. com or you’re watching Doug demure, the term probably is what leads to a description of this type of tracking as probabilistic tracking since it is only based on a probability. The other kind of tracking, which can be done by Google and Facebook, is called deterministic tracking. Now apple can do this too if you use iCloud private relay, but I don’t have any indication that this is being used this way, so I will not get into it.
Deterministic tracking is based on actual knowledge of who you are and most of you are amazingly blind to this. How does Google and Facebook know who you are on the Internet? Well, did you forget you logged in? Did you log out? Well, no, I’m sure you didn’t. Should you log out? Don’t bother, it won’t do any good. Now this is just part of the story, but let’s make it clear.
Your identity is clearly known to big tech because there is always a trace of your Google ID or Facebook ID or Apple ID on your device. In fact, modern devices do not function very well unless you log in because you are logged in. Then this can lead to deterministic tracking since it’s been 100% clearly determined what your identity is and often cross verified by two factor authentication, phone number, email and other data like location.
Now this alone is not enough to track you all over the Internet, so you need to understand this. Well, in order for you to be tracked and every click known, there must be someone watching the Internet for those identity markers or ids. But wait, isn’t each other third party platform or website a separate entity? How could a Google or Facebook spy on activity of a third party site? Well, unfortunately most websites, and I’m going to guess 99% of them, use some tools from Google.
This can be in the form of Google Analytics, Google AdSense, or use of Google libraries to supply features to the website, including fonts and things called cdns. You think Google is doing this because they’re such nice guys and want to help the world? Yeah, we’ll give you anything you want for free. The explanation for the presence of Google in a third party site is that Google exists in these sites as a subsite or in HTML, the technical term is called an iframe.
Or in everyday lingo we’ll just call it a website within a website. In order to use Google tools on these platforms, which I have already stated is around 99% of our websites, Google requires that their code be integrated into the code of the site. Seems simple enough. Google instructs third party developers to insert some simple Javascript into their websites, and some features like Google Analytics, Google Ads and so on are automatically enabled.
But just to be clear, what exactly happens here is that if you go to a website like GitHub. com, which is owned by Microsoft, you are also going to google. com in some hidden website inside that website. Yes, the Google website is often hidden. It is an invisible iframe. Or in the case of ads, the ads are visible signs of Google Adsense. Now this has consequences, consequences that the average person truly wants to ignore.
The rule in browsers is that a domain, in this case google. com, can access any little trackers of information left by google. com. There is no restriction in this. So if you’re on YouTube, Google of course has the Google ID stored on your device. Now when you go to another website like GitHub. com, which would be typically unrelated, the little hidden google. com on GitHub would be activated.
And it should be obvious that the hidden google. com knows your Google ID since it has access to cookies related to your prior Google login. Just another technical factoid, a subwindow in a website. Again, it is called an iframe. Can intercept the traffic in the main website called Dom. And that is because the Javascript code from Google is installed on the main website. Code from this, every click is collected by Google.
Now I said every click and I’m not kidding. The way Google Analytics works, it actually tracks every page you go into and records that. And the site owner can examine that in Google Analytics. What you do not see is that there is a Google Analytics for you, for you and your Google iD. This is too incredibly simple. Yet why does the average person not understand this? So let me restate this for you.
As part of the standard Google Analytics data that gives a website information about their web traffic, all that data is directly associated to people’s Google ids. If that Google ID is discoverable at the time, are there times when there is no Google ID? Yes, but this is extremely rare for the average person. Most people running a Normie phone, meaning an iPhone or Google Android, is logged in. You’re logged in with your Apple ID and with your Google ID on most devices, you would never think twice about this.
If you go to a browser and clear cookies and history and never log into Google, then this browser will not have a Google ID. So if you go to YouTube from this browser, then your activities on YouTube will not be associated with a Google ID. If you go to any third party site like GitHub. com again from this browser, then in theory you will not be identified even with the embedded Google code in GitHub.
com. Now, assuming you’ve logged into Google. com on this browser but did not clear cookies, then when you log out, don’t expect that this will hide your Google ID. There are cookies still remaining associated with Google. com that show the last login. If you doubt this, log out from Google and then try to log in again. Your last logins will be shown to you a history of different Google ids.
Some of you will, of course say that you’re using an iPhone and not a Google Android. So you imagine this doesn’t apply to you. Of course it does. Not only can your Apple id be discovered by the apps, but you’re logged into various apps all the time. If you’re logged into YouTube on your iPhone, then the YouTube app knows both your Apple ID and Google ID. So understand the effect of all this.
This is giving permission to Google to know everything you do on the Internet and you do not care. Facebook has a similar mechanism to Google. Facebook, as you know, also runs ads and many platforms integrate similar code to Google Analytics to track traffic and also implement a Facebook like button. Unlike Google, this is not 99% of all sites. I’m guessing it’s a much smaller number, though. I’m guessing also that as a percentage of total traffic, it is still up there.
This is because I’m certain it is integrated into many popular sites. So again, the rules are the same. You log into facebook. com, a cookie is retained with your login id. Then that’s discoverable by the iframe for facebook. com that’s found in the third party site. The added threat with Facebook is that unlike Google, Facebook knows exactly who you are. You are crowd verified, contactless verified, and you’re using your real name.
Facebook may not know every single click like Google, but they know a lot of those clicks. Now, let me explain a concept that the average person doesn’t know about. And that’s the untrackable phone. I say untrackable only as it pertains to big tech. It is untrackable because you cannot do deterministic tracking. You can still do probabilistic tracking, but that’s often insufficient to guarantee an identity. The popular term I use for this kind of phone is the Google phone, and the main characteristic of this type of phone and its most important feature is that it has no Google login, no Google ID.
Even better than that, it doesn’t have any software that communicates with Google at all, so it doesn’t emit any data to Google. If you go to a third party site or platform, the Google Analytics on that site or platform will show an unknown identity. Thus, none of your actions can be attributed to a Google ID. Think about this, because it is a surefire way to avoid every click from being tracked.
You can achieve something similar with a computer using browsers, though if you have a standard phone, you will fail. As I will explain later, if you use a browser and you cleared cookies and do not log in into Google at all after that, then your identity will be hidden from Google. This is definitely a method of obfuscation that can work with careful planning. What I typically do is dedicate a browser to accessing sites where I know I will never log into Google.
As long as Google is not able to leave a cookie on this browser with your Google ID, then you’re good to go. So the typical example I give is to use two to three browsers. Let’s say you’re watching YouTube on Chrome and you’re logged into YouTube. This of course means your Google id is known. Then you have a second browser, which let’s say it’s brave. This is the browser dedicated to non Google sites.
If you use this browser for anything non Google only, then your activity on those sites will never be known to Google and match to your identity. Now let me explain where this will fail. The problem is when people do not think these carefully and come up with partial solutions. If you have a standard Normie iPhone and Google Android logged into Google, of course, then through various tracking techniques like location tracking and IP address, then deterministic tracking may apply to you.
The Google ID on the phone will be correlated to your activities on the computer. This is a new kind of tracking that Google relies on heavily and it is called cross device tracking. The issue here is that your deterministic device will infect the probabilistic device and then both will be deterministic. That’s what cross device tracking intends to do. The reason they can enforce this easily is because the normie phone is running a Google app that knows everything about the phone.
The phone number itself is verified to be your device because of the two FA phone number. The phone has the IMEI and IMZ and the phone will always appear on the same network with the same ip address as the other devices, as well as being in the same exact location which is verified by the tracking that can’t be turned off on a normie phone. This is why the only way to strategically prevent all this is to have an untrackable phone, meaning a de googled phone.
This has no Google id plus it has no location tracking. I know the Normie understands that some data is collected, but I would make a guess that the average person doesn’t realize that it is every click. I’ve made many videos explaining what happens when a company like Google knows so much about you, but I will be frank with you. It will cause this video to be suppressed so they don’t want that known.
I will link some of these other suppressed videos in the description. Be smart folks. There is no justification for this kind of 100% spying off our Internet actions. This is extreme. In a future video I will explain how some seemingly smart people think that knowing everything about you is good for an AI, which they claim will also be good for you and for society. I will tell you right now that this is where we are headed and it is a very sad looking future.
I started a company to provide privacy solutions to the average person instead of just talking about problems. Today, the primary privacy solution is still to use a degoogled phone. This phone is an invisible phone on the Internet. Because it has no Google ID or Apple id, it cannot be precisely identified. It is also immune from being geolocated by third parties. Check that out. These phones are around $400, so they are cheaper than normal phones.
It’s what I use. We have the BytesVpn service which I started a few years ago. The purpose of a VPN service is to hide your ip address without any protection. Every interaction on the Internet will identify your home connection. It is very important to suppress this information. Our VPN service has worldwide coverage and is provided by an entity known to you, me. Hopefully someone you can trust. We have a Braxmail service that hides identity information from your email and prevents you from showing up on contact lists.
It also eliminates ip addresses from showing up in the header or in logs. We offer unlimited aliases, seven domains and webmail. Check that out for $50 a year. All these are on my store on Bracksme. Sign up on there and you will not be asked for personal information to sign up, I want to remind you that I do live streams on Thursday on Rumble and on robbraxman locals.
com. Com. So that’s where I can go deeper in some of these subject matter and you can ask questions yourself. So hope to see you there on Thursdays at 08:00 p. m. Thank you for watching and see you next time. .
See more of Rob Braxman Tech on their Public Channel and the MPN Rob Braxman Tech channel.
