Re: Just out of curiosity
If you block 3rd-party cookies in your safety settings, and use NoScript and an ad blocker, are you safer from tracking ?
Asking for a friend, of course.
Only if you use your friend's IP address. Irrespective of what you do, the moment you pull data from a website you'll end up with an entry in access.log because that's simply how things work (well, Apache, no idea about MS stuff, that may just send it straight to Microsoft to boot). If you don't have it locked down, it wll also flag your presence via images that the website loads from 3rd parties - even the FONT may be enough if they use Google fonts (that's cached, but it still gives them an initial hit, plus changing parameters at Google's end may limit that cache timing).
So, best use someone else's IP address. PS: if you use a VPN, you merely give the VPN provider access to your surfing habits.
Of course, the best approach would be to use the Tor network, but that is (a) usually a bit short on usable bandwidth and (b) quite often blocked by sites (not just the dodgy ones) because the majority of traffic from those nodes are hacking attempts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
