Why DoNotTrack ?

Believe it or not, your every activity on the web is being tracked. Companies are collecting your data and using it in many different ways. They use cookies, web beacons and analytics trackers to create your behavioral profile. Frightening.. isn’t it ?

Well we at Nuova Labs are working tirelessly to build tools and services that help you protect your privacy without sacrificing convenience. One of the projects that we have been working on for the last 4 months is an app, aptly named DoNotTrack. We launched the first version of DoNotTrack on 18 Oct and got a great response as well as lots of feedback and questions from various communities.

DoNotTrack App

Today We want to discuss the technicalities behind DoNotTrack as well as the power that it gives in your hand to protect your privacy.

To start with, let’s choose a popular website: www.telegraph.co.uk. We will use the web inspector tool for analyzing the website. Lets see which scripts are loaded when we visit www.telegraph.co.uk.

Scripts loaded with www.telegraph.co.uk website

We found that around 80 scripts are loaded with the webpage. Agree that not all of them are tracking scripts but a majority of them are either web beacons or analytics trackers. Lets search for the term ‘beacon’.

Scripts with the term ‘beacon’ in their name.

By the name itself, you can see that these 4 scripts are meant for tracking. Well there are many scripts which are named randomly to avoid being caught. One of the beacon being caught red handed here is of Scorecard Research.

Some of the other points to be noted in the above screenshot are :

1. Data Usage : 9.43 MB
2. Time taken to load the webpage : 14.19 seconds

Now lets block all beacons using DoNotTrack .

Block All WebBeacons in DoNotTrack

Now we run the same website through Safari Web Inspector and look if DoNotTrack really works :). Well it does work and now the number of scripts reduced to just 42 removing all the beacons. Now we again search for the term ‘beacon’ and guess what, no such script got loaded.

After blocking all web beacons in DoNotTrack , no script with search term ‘beacon’ found.

Again

1. Data Usage : 6.97 MB (26% less)
2. Time taken to load the webpage : 11.15 seconds (27% faster loading)

So DoNotTrack helps you :

• Protects your personal data
• Improve the speed of page load on Safari
• Saves Cellular Data
• Saves Battery Power

Cannot ask for anything more from an app. Do give it a try and let us know your thoughts and feedback. We are all ears. App Link.