1. Browsers: Your Access to the Web

The web is full of great and fantastical things. Things to inspire, things to wow you and things to make your life and mind grow in many, many ways.

Web browsers such as Chrome, Safari, Edge and all the others are so powerful that they are computers within computers. They run code that operate themselves for themselves and for the companies that own the websites you're signed in to.

The snag is, there are also many, many things they vie for your attention and it's fun, right? YouTube for one; games for another and many other forms of entertainment.

The companies that produce this content for you unfortunately don't do all this for free. The products they make are free to join, however, once you get past, say, level 3, you need to pay to progress. Else, you can be stuck at level 3 trying and trying to get better only for adverts to take over the screen... just like this one.

What is the difference between regular adverts and adverts on the web?

Adverts on the web are different to the adverts on the street, BTS or the roadside. The plain adverts made of paper, glass and plastic you see outside are made to catch your eye and think about the colours etc of the brand in the vain hope you'll buy it when you're in the shop next time.

Adverts on websites have things called trackers. Trackers use a thing nearly all websites use called 'Cookies'. These little add-ons that are built into your browser know a lot about you and can link up to the next page in another tab you go to and it will try to match the advert to you based on what you've been viewing on the web previously.

1. Try this: Click on the 'Padlock' in your browser in the address bar right before patana.fireflycloud.asia and see what it says in the cookies section. Does yours have 8 cookies too?

Can they be trusted? Sometimes, but mostly not really. They are made to help reload the page quicker when you use is again. There are sometimes personal information inside the cookie file that is taken from the website when you added your username and password to it. However, you have to trust that the website protects your data. And, well, this is a level of trust we have to raise with people we don't know on a service we don't pay for. So where does the money come from?

Look at this image from informationisbeautiful.com - these are the data leaks from websites that try to look after your data. The data was stored in files like cookies that sit in databases that we expect these websites to look after properly.

Where do the trackers and adverts come from?

Look at this picture below. The box on the page shows us which advertising companies are trying to track us. You can also see that I'm also in the middle of telling them I don't trust them!

Part 1:

Protecting yourself and your personal data.

Choose the right browser that has your data thought about first. Chrome is owned by Google. Google is the worlds largest advertising company. So it stands that Chrome will allow any trackers to advertise and use these tracking methods. Even if you use Ad Block Plus. And as for Grammarly, how does it know what you're typing?

Firefox.

Firefox is a browser that thinks about your data first.

Within Firefox we can control and protect ourselves using things called add-ons. These are made by people who also care about your personal data too. So they let you control it.

We're going to test these add-ons out.

Let's get Firefox. Download and install here. You will find it both for Mac and Windows.

Then, go to part 2 where we will customise it, make it look smart and choose the right add-ons.

Part 2 is here.