Have you ever encounter ed the pop-up ads on your Mac? Some pop-up ads use phishing tactics—like warnings or prizes—to trick you into believing they’are from Apple or another trusted company, so you’ll share personal or financial information. Some might offer free downloads, software updates, or plugins, to try to trick you into installing unwanted software. Others show items you added in the shopping cart in an online store in the past, and guide you to purchase again. They seems to keep track of your online behavior. So how to manage and remove those pop-up ads and block the tracking on the Mac?
Once you encounter the pop-up ads, you should avoid interacting with pop-ups or webpages. And here are some tips that can help you manage pop-ups ads and block the tracking on the Mac.
Why the pop-up ads can track your information?
Why do those pop-up ads know us so well? Because all websites use the browser cookie to store and record the user's browsing activity. Cookies are mainly used for three purposes: Session management (Logins, shopping carts, game scores, or anything else the server should remember), Personalization (User preferences, themes, and other settings), Tracking (Recording and analyzing user behavior).
The tracking cookies, and especially third-party tracking cookies, are commonly used as ways to compile long-term records of individuals' browsing histories. And it's the biggest threat to the leakage of personal privacy data.
Normally, a cookie's domain attribute will match the domain that is shown in the web browser's address bar. This is called a first-party cookie. A third-party cookie, however, belongs to a domain different from the one shown in the address bar. This sort of cookie typically appears when web pages feature content from external websites, such as banner advertisements. This opens up the potential for tracking the user's browsing history and is often used by advertisers in an effort to serve relevant advertisements to each user.
As an example, suppose a user visits www.example.org. This website contains an advertisement from ad.foxytracking.com, which, when downloaded, sets a cookie belonging to the advertisement's domain (ad.foxytracking.com). Then, the user visits another website, www.foo.com, which also contains an advertisement from ad.foxytracking.com and sets a cookie belonging to that domain (ad.foxytracking.com). Eventually, both of these cookies will be sent to the advertiser when loading their advertisements or visiting their website. The advertiser can then use these cookies to build up a browsing history of the user across all the websites that have ads from this advertiser.
How to stop the pop-up ads to track your information?
1. Use the browser settings to stop the pop-up windows and filter some dangerous sites.
Safari:
1. Block pop-ups windows Choose Safari > Preferences, then click Security. Select “Block pop-up windows.”
2. Block unnecessary content: Choose Safari > Websites , then Deselect each plug-in.
3. Choose Safari > Preferences, click Privacy, then select “Prevent cross-site tracking.”
4. Choose Safari > Preferences, click Privacy, then select “Ask websites not to track me.”
Chrome:
1. Click Chrome Preference... access Settings > Privacy and security > Content settings > Popups, switch off
2. Settings > Privacy and security > swith on Protect you and your device from dangerous sites
Firefox:
1. Click Firefox Preference... access Settings > Privacy and Security > Permissions, select Block pop-up windows, Warn you when websites try to install add-ons, Prevent accessibility services from accessing your browser
2. Click Firefox Preference... access Settings > Privacy and Security > Security, select Block dangerous and deceptive content
Restart the browser.
2. Remove insecure and malicious cookies
The cookie data store the tracking information, so we need to remove the insecure and malicious cookie data. You can remove all cookie data in browser settings, but some useful cookie, which may log you out of some websites. Another solution use the third-party app - Cookie Viewer to view the browser cookie data and check the security, then delete some cookie data from some website which you don't want to keep them on the computer. And you can download it here fore free.
- Fireebok Cookie Viewer
A Cookie Tool to view, manage browser and app cookie data
For Mac OS X
You can view the cookie domain, name, secure, path and value in the app. When it locates the cookie data, the program provides you with the option to delete it. The app is Cookie Viewer, it support almost all browser and inside app cookie.
Final thoughts
Many Advertising alliance use pop up ads or illegal tracking to record user information, so it is important to protect our private data.
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