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So what if I'm tracked? Why it still matters

You send a friend a link to some sneakers. This is what goes with it.

The link you shared
amazon.com/dp/B0CK1RUN42?tag=sneakerdeals-20&ascsubtag=ig_story&gclid=Cj0KCQiA4…
  • Who gets paid if your friend buys
  • Where it was posted, an Instagram story
  • The Google ad you clicked to find them
amazon.com/dp/B0CK1RUN42Same sneakers. Nothing attached.

One link says little. Thousands of them describe your life.

747 timesa day, your data is put up for auction. What you read and where you are goes out to ad companies bidding for your attention, every single day.1
99.98%of people can be named from "anonymous" data. A few details like age, postcode and gender are enough to connect the pieces. Removing your name doesn't make you anonymous.2
4location snapshots are enough to find you. A snapshot is where your phone was at one moment, like home at 11 p.m. or the office at 9 a.m. Apps and phone networks collect these all day. In a study of 1.5 million people, just 4 of them picked out 95%, so your location history leads straight back to you.3
Opens Untrack with your link already cleaned. Free, no sign up.

Free, no ads, no tracking.

"I have nothing to hide."

Privacy was never about hiding crimes. It's about who gets to know your habits, your health and where you go, and what they do with it.

"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."4Edward Snowden

What "nothing to hide" misses

  • They know more than you told them. From 300 Facebook Likes, a computer judged people's personality better than their own spouse could.5 Target gave shoppers a pregnancy score from about 25 products they bought.6
  • Your location is for sale. The FTC sued a data broker, alleging its data could reveal visits to reproductive health clinics, places of worship and shelters.7
  • It can go public. A top US church official resigned after a news site used commercially available app data showing he used Grindr and visited gay bars.8
  • It leaks. In 2024, 2.9 billion rows of personal records from one data broker were put up for sale.9
  • It changes what you see. Orbitz showed Mac users different, and in many cases pricier, hotels.10
  • It isn't only yours. When a friend taps the link you sent, their click is tracked too, and tied back to your share.

Why there's more of it now

Browsers started blocking tracking cookies, so the tracking moved into the links you share.11 Apple now strips it from links in Messages and Mail.12

Why companies do it

Money. The more they know about you, the more your attention sells for. Real time bidding alone is an industry worth over $117 billion.13

Before you share

  • Clean the link. Paste it in the box above.
  • Tap "Ask App Not to Track" when an app asks.
  • Give apps your location only while you use them.

Every clean link is one less thread back to you.

Sources (13)
  1. ICCL: The biggest data breach (2022, PDF)
  2. Rocher, Hendrickx and de Montjoye, Nature Communications (2019)
  3. de Montjoye et al., Unique in the Crowd, Scientific Reports (2013)
  4. Mic: Edward Snowden on privacy (2015)
  5. Youyou, Kosinski and Stillwell, PNAS (2015)
  6. Forbes: How Target figured out a teen girl was pregnant (2012)
  7. FTC sues Kochava (2022)
  8. The Guardian: Church official resigns after location data report (2021)
  9. Krebs on Security: National Public Data breach (2024)
  10. BBC: Orbitz shows Mac users pricier hotels (2012)
  11. WebKit: Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.2 (2019)
  12. Apple Newsroom: new privacy features, June 2023
  13. ICCL: Report on the scale of real time bidding data broadcasts