Get Disconnected
BeckyStrause
Many websites, including EberlySystems.com , are using widgets to easily connect viewers to social media. However, these widgets make it possible for those social media sites to track you, and make it easier for someone to hack your profiles over unsecured public wireless internet.
Every time a user lands on a page with a social media widget, the social media site (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.) sends a unique identifier that lets that site track your browsing history. For this to work, a person only needs to have logged into the social media site once in the past month. This tracking is just one of the issues, probably the more common one, dealing with social media widgets.
The second issue is explained on the disconnect.me blog like this, “When you connect to a wireless network, your computer or mobile device sends and receives data similarly to a radio. Unless the data is encrypted by the network or sites you go to, anybody else with access to the network might be “tuning in” to view your search history, read your email messages, steal your credit-card info, and so on.
A wireless network can add encryption by using one of a few different security protocols, but these protocols have proven easy to defeat and public Wi-Fi like at a coffee shop, library, or airport uses none of the above. Sites can add encryption by using the HTTPS protocol rather than HTTP, but only login pages tend to require HTTPS (so that usernames and passwords are protected).
Because a site will set cookies to authenticate you after you log in, an attacker could just capture your cookies when you visit an unencrypted, non-login page then break into your account with them. This attack is called ‘session hijacking’ or ‘sidejacking’.”
A video to explain this issue can be found here.
One of the most simple solutions to combat these security and privacy issues is to go to disconnect.me , read more about the issues and use to available tools to disconnect yourself.
