We are all aware that we are being tracked when we are online. It’s why if you spend five minutes searching for garden furniture online, garden furniture ads will follow you around the web for at least the next month.

However, when it comes to the large amount of information you provide every time you connect to the web, you may not have realized the seriousness of the situation. Websites and web apps instantly obtain a lot of data about your device and the way it’s configured the moment you load them, which can be used to identify you even if you’re not logged in anywhere.

The Since You Arrived website pulls back the curtain on this tracking, so you can see exactly what is reported and revealed about you, and visiting it is a must if you have any interest in your online privacy.

Find out what your browser logs

Open the Since You Arrived portal and you’ll see five sections, from left to right, all of which reveal something different about you and the device you’re browsing on. Every site or app you visit does not necessarily record all of this information, but it is available to be recorded and used to identify you.

The site is divided into sections called volumes, and the most pertinent when it comes to online privacy is Volume IV. Everything your browser knows about you will slowly be revealed and you can scroll down the page to find out more; This list of information starts with your location (as reported by your Internet Service Provider) and the browser software you are using.

Some useful technical knowledge is also included in the summary. Did you know, for example, that your device will typically report its current time zone before a web page finishes loading? Other data you’ll likely give up will include your system’s graphics processor, your device’s battery life, the website you visited before this one, and how much time you spent on the page.

Many of the details you will see here are very particular. “Its display is 1470 by 956 pixels, rendered at 2x density, meaning it’s almost certainly a recent, high-end display,” the page told me. “Your device volunteered all of this in the first few milliseconds of the connection. It will do it again on the next page you visit and the one after that.”

The other parts of the Since You Arrived site are also worth exploring. Volume I gives you a number of real-time metrics, including births, deaths, songs streamed, questions asked to the AI, and hands held, while Volume II tells you about last night’s sunset in your part of the world.

Volume III shares details of a scientific discovery near your current location: I obtained the trilobites known as Lotagnosto—And Volume V finds the point on Earth furthest from you and anyone else currently on the Since You Arrived site.

How to protect your privacy

Websites can use combinations of these data points to determine that you are the same person as you move from page to page, without you having to type your name or log into any account. However, while it is impossible to completely stop this data collection, there are ways to limit it.

A recommended option is to install a VPN. These programs don’t make you anonymous on the Internet, but they do hide your true location and time zone, as well as offering a host of other security and privacy benefits, so those are two bits of information that browsers won’t have about you, although to really thwart fingerprinting, you need to change your spoofed location fairly regularly.

You can also think about changing your web browser. Mozilla Firefox takes a particularly strict stance against data tracking, for example: it has specific anti-fingerprinting technology built in, so it will hide certain bits of information from sites and randomize others, making it much harder for anyone to figure out who you are.

If you want to make the most of online privacy, consider the Tor browser. It has even more fingerprint protections than Firefox, including generalization and obfuscation of data reported to websites, and connects to the web through a series of nodes that further conceal who you are and where you are (even more effectively than a VPN, at the expense of some speed).

Using your browser’s incognito mode whenever possible also helps, as it restricts what websites can remember and log about you on your own device; Although there are limits to the privacy protections that incognito mode can provide, it is better than nothing. By the way, the Tor browser does not have an incognito mode, because it basically runs in a similar state all the time.

There are also a number of other steps you can take in terms of settings within individual apps, platforms and programs – when it comes to Google, for example, you can limit ad personalization and remove your activity from Google, although this is more about privacy in general than limiting what websites will know about you as soon as you visit them.

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