They are watching you

Today we are talking algorithms and tracking online. Recently while looking through the analytics for my YouTube channel it shocked me just how much information about all of you viewing the channels available to me. I can see everything from location, gender, device, operating system, location, age, and more. This is just the information that YouTube has chosen to share with me as a creator.

From interactions I have had with people working in big data, I know they have much much more. Facebook has recently been in the news over a feud with apple regarding cross platform and cross app tracking, but they are hardly alone in their use of such things. This has been going on for well over a decade, and is widely used in advertising.

Everything is tracking us these days. Because of this, my best advice is to use a VPN whenever you go online. A VPN, or virtual private network, makes it appear as though you are using a different computer in a different location. It makes it so they cannot track you. Of course you need to make sure you are using a reputable VPN, or they will just sell your information anyway.

This being said, a VPN probably won't fool the government. They still have ways of tracking you. It should work for Google and the others however.