Here’s how to stop tracking data to suck your health data

In April, the marking and CalMatters found that California covered, California in the Health Exchange, was Send personal health information to its users to LinkedInS News triggered Class of class actions and questions from federal MPs. In June an additional investigation revealed that exchanges supported by four other countries have Also expired the sensitive health data of visitorsS

Readers asked: Is there anything I can do to stop my information not to leak out this way?

The answer is yes.

The tracking people we found on health exchanges are Extremely common and are used by the most popular websites in the world. We found them on websites that people use Prepare for college., Make your taxes., Get a mortgageor Report a mental health crisisS The good news is that you can block a lot, if not all of these followers with just a few steps.

What happens to our health data?

Owners of the health exchange websites use services provided by technology companies such as LinkedIn, Google and Snapchat to track users’ activity and direct advertising. To do this, website owners install and configure code provided by technology companies on their pages. This code is called “tracking”.

When you charge a page, the tracking code works, collects data and sends it to the servers of technology companies. These data can be anything from the device profile and the browser you use for each word you enter in shape. Tracker can also read and write cookiesWhich can follow you in multiple websites.

How can I protect my data from these trackers?

As the data is collected and sent from your browser, you can exercise some control over it. Here are the options we tested that successfully blocked the trackers:

1. Change your settings to block more trackers

Some browsers block many default trackers and can block more.

2. Install an extension to protect browser privacy

If you use a desktop browser, a straight solution is to Install an extension to protect your browser privacy. We tested Confidential and Ublock Origin Lite And they confirmed that the two were blocking the trackers from LinkedIn, Snapchat and Google, which we looked at in our stories.

3. Switch to a new browser

Chrome and Safari, the browsers that most people use do not stop all the trackers we found to share your data from the field. If you do not want to change your settings as suggested above, installing a new browser focused on confidentiality is what we recommend. In our tests, Bold and DuckDuckgo The browsers blocked the trackers we profiled. (Full Discovery: DuckDuckGo has donated to the marking.)

What doesn’t work to block these trackers?

The use of a virtual private network (VPN) will not block these trackers. VPN services are convenient for darkening your location, which is a key detail that data brokers use to identify individuals. Unfortunately, VPN will not prevent trackers from reading and writing cookies and sharing details about your device, browser and site activity. Also, VPN may have their own problems with data sharingS

Sightseeing in “private” or “incognito” mode will not block those trackingS Using these modes will stop cookies from tracking you to other sites, but will not protect you from sharing your location, device, browser and activity.

How else can I protect my personal data?

The steps we recommended a long way to go a long way to allow you to choose when and with whom you share your personal information while doing things on the web. But the browser is not the only place where your data is collected; Tracking is everywhere from video game consoles to smart TVs. You can check Marc’s tender series of January For bite size measures to reduce your protection, and follow these guides to protect your data in many different places: