What are Tracking Protection Lists?
Tracking Protection Lists (TPLs) are a new Privacy Enhancing Technology in Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser designed to restrict the covert tracking of your online browsing activities by third parties.
Most people are unaware that companies use technology embedded into most web sites which allow them to track your activities and build behavioural profiles based on those activities, for the purpose of behavioural advertising.
In May 2011 European Member States introduced new regulations requiring companies to obtain your consent to use such technologies in an attempt to give more control to you over your privacy online. Unfortunately there is a great deal of confusion over the new regulations which means your privacy is still not protected appropriately - as such we have developed these tracking protection tools as a pro-active solution to the problem.
It is important to note that these tools do not guarantee you will not be tracked and profiled online, but they do go some way to reduce the risk of such exposure, until such time as the regulations are clarified and added to existing national laws, and even then, these tools will help safeguard privacy against those that would choose to ignore these new laws.
Tracking Protection Lists can be added to Internet Explorer 9 (see video tutorial) to directly block embedded third party tracking technologies in the web sites you visit on a day to day basis making your online experience more private.
We have developed three different tracking protection lists covering three segments which through comprehensive research, have been highlighted as significant concerns. These include Child Protection, Analytics and general Behavioural Profiling, but our tools also allow you to build a custom list depending on your own requirements. For example, you may be happy to have companies use third party tools (like Google Analytics) to generate data on how their web site is used, but might not want advertising companies to track you across multiple web sites to build a behavioural profile. Similarly, you might be happy to allow companies to track you but might want more protection for your children. Or you may be happy for certain companies that you trust, to track your activities but not companies you have not developed a trust relationship with or companies where you do not receive direct value from such tracking.
Explore the sections in the menu above for more information about the different lists we provide and how you can generate a customised list based on your own specifications, from our extensive database, by filling in a simple web form. You can even help us by suggesting additions to our database which you feel should be there – this is a rapidly moving industry with millions of tracking URLs generated on a daily basis, so reporting new URLs to us improves our tools and benefits everyone using them.
This web site contains no tracking technologies or third party analytic tools; we do log limited information about visitors to this site for the purposes of resource and information management but these logs are deleted every 24 hours with only aggregated data stored for maintaining the web site. By aggregated data we mean information such as how many people visit the web site, which pages are visited and which countries those visitors come from – no IP addresses or other identifying information is retained and none of this data is sold or shared with third parties other than for illustrative purposes at conferences and other public events designed to raise awareness of the issues and the tools we provide to counter those issues.
For more information about how this data is used please read our Privacy Policy or feel free to Contact Us using the links at the bottom of this page.
