Tracking protection in Microsoft Edge

Nowadays, pages that do not use cookies or third-party scripts are rare. As a result, your activities on the Internet are tracked across sites, because the included scripts are assigned to a few entities.

Unfortunately, the "Do Not Track" directive does not help with this. It is just a guideline.

In Germany alone, around 4 billion euros were spent on search engine advertising in 2019. That is 55 euros per Internet user in Germany. In the US the advertising revenues for search engine advertising in 2019 amounted to an incredible 48 billion Euro! [1] [2]

The best-known representatives are of course Google and Facebook, among others. Their main business is the placement of targeted advertising.

With the ability to track the behavior of billions of users, you also have an extremely powerful tool in your hand to control opinion. The American election campaign in 2016 is a good example.

Why do other websites include tracking scripts?

Tracking scripts do not only track, but superficially solve another task that should save work for the site operator or the developer.

The tracking of the user is a Trojan horse, so to speak, but most of the site operators know about it, of course.

They knowingly accept the tracking of their own users by a third party, because the disadvantaged person is not the operator but the user, and thus the advantage for the operator prevails.

Use Google Analytics for conversion tracking ❌

Google Analytics is primarily used to determine the effectiveness of ads placed.

The keywords are "Conversion Tracking", which tells whether an ad has resulted in a purchase or registration.

This is of course important for professionals who create Google Ads on behalf of a client to document the success of their work with the client. In addition, Google Analytics provides data on the origin of the user and which search terms were entered by the user.

There are countless other vendors, like Plausible Analytics, that provide similar functionality or merge user data from different platforms. [3]

Include Facebook comments in the blog ❌

If you integrate the Facebook comment function into your blog, you do not need to worry about having your own comment system. Furthermore, the users are already verified through their Facebook account. The advantages seem to be obvious.

The fact that the visitor of the blog is tracked by Facebook, even if the visitor has no Facebook account, is accepted.

The same is true for other commenting systems like Disqus. [4]

Load program libraries from a foreign server ❌

JavaScript program libraries or even fonts from an external server, which are important for the functionality of your own site, are gladly loaded.

The advantages are:

• You reduce the load on your own server, because the file is loaded from a foreign server.

• You may be able to get the latest version of the library.

Disadvantages when loading foreign JavaScript libraries

On closer inspection, however, the advantages turn out to be disadvantages.

• Of course, the user also leaves data traces there by loading the files.

• If the external server fails or is overloaded, this will affect the availability of your own site.

• The foreign server can be hijacked by another third party and used for negative purposes.

• An unsolicited update of the library can lead to a malfunction of your own application, because the integration of the update is untested.

Show advertisements on your own page ❌

Anyone who displays advertisements on their own page hopes for advertising income.

Unfortunately, scripts are usually loaded by the big advertising providers, which sometimes strongly interfere with the behavior of the site in order to avoid advertising blockers and to track the user.

There are even ad systems that deliberately delay the loading of their own page if an ad blocker is detected, so that the user switches the ad blocker off again for a better site experience.

Tredict does not need a cookie disclaimer on the first page, because we do not use tracking cookies (*) and do not include third-party scripts.

How can you run a website without cookies?

Running a site without tracking cookies and without loading software from third-party servers has real advantages. Above all, it is not difficult to implement if you just give it some thought.

Data protection for the user and independence from other service providers are unbeatable long-term advantages.

Your own solution is still running 10 years later. The maintenance effort decreases permanently. Because of not having to loading of scripts from external sources, the site has better availability.

Tredict only saves settings relating to the user interface in the local storage.

Conversion Tracking with own parameter ✔️

Instead of an utma code [5], which would then be evaluated by Google Analytics, we set a simple parameter to our landing page url when someone clicks on one of our ads.

This parameter is simply stored in the database during user registration and then we know, whether the user has registered through an advertisement.

We cannot and do not want to determine more than this.

This does not require a cookie or script.

Simple user management ✔️

Tredict has its own user management, which is connected to the user database.

There we can see when you have registered, up until when you have write access, to which device manufacturers you have connected your account and a few other things.

We do not need any third-party software to merge this data in any way.

Just as a priest knows who regularly comes to his confessional and counts the collection, so of course, we also know how many people are registered with us. But, nobody else needs to know that!

We try to keep the volume of metadata about you as small as possible and act according to the principle of data minimization. So, you can simply enter any name. We also ask, for example, only for the year of birth and not for the day.

The business model works without advertisements ✔️

If your business model is not based on advertising income, you don't need to show any ads on your website.

You finance Tredict by purchasing 12 months of write access. It is as simple as that.

Host external JavaScript libraries yourself ✔️

The own hosting of foreign JavaScript libraries gives us full control over updates and ensures good availability and performance. If our servers don't work anymore, then nothing works at all. But of course, we try to prevent this.

When hosting other libraries, you must make sure that the license of the software allows this.

Load libraries only when they are needed ✔️

Unfortunately, there is one exception, but we have mitigated this as much as possible. Our payment service provider, Paddle, does not allow us to host their program library ourselves. Therefore, we only load this library when you make a payment. So, you can stay unimpressed for most of the year!

We did look around for alternatives, but could not find any without this problem.

The loading of map data and weather data can be turned off

Optional loading of maps ✔️

Even if the data trace can be considered very small when loading map data from OpenStreetMap, you are leaving traces in OSM.

You can therefore deactivate the map at Tredict.

The same applies to the weather data.

Host comment function in blogs yourself ✔️

There are countless comment systems that you can install on your own servers.

We need no tracking

We do not need the tools that the tracking operators offer us as site operators.

We regard their superficial functionality as a Trojan horse. We are not going to do these deals, because it is bad for us.
We would still like to have a self-sufficient system in 10 years' time, and are not willing to deliver our users to others.

Tredict is not called Trackdict. ;-)

Period.

* Except for the session cookie for your login status.
[1] https://de.statista.com/outlook/219/137/suchmaschinenwerbung/deutschland
[2] https://de.statista.com/outlook/219/109/suchmaschinenwerbung/usa
[3] https://segment.com/engineering
[4] https://disqus.com/features/monetize
[5] https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/cookie-usage#gajs