How websites follow you around

Tracking is not one technique. It is four or five, layered, and blocking only the famous one leaves most of it running.

Cookies

A small file a site stores in your browser. First-party cookies are set by the site you are on and are mostly how sensible things work: staying signed in, keeping a basket. Third-party cookies are set by something embedded in the page — an advert, a share button, an analytics script — and the same company's code is embedded on thousands of other sites, which is how one advertiser learns your browsing across all of them.

Safari and Firefox block third-party cookies by default. Chrome's position has moved repeatedly. If you use Chrome, check the setting rather than assuming.

Fingerprinting

The one that matters now. Instead of storing anything, a script reads what your browser reveals anyway: screen size, time zone, fonts installed, language, graphics behaviour, the exact browser build. Combined, that is often unique enough to recognise you with no cookie at all.

Fingerprinting is harder to block because the information is genuinely needed to render a page. Browsers reduce it by making everyone look more alike rather than by hiding — which is why a "privacy-hardened" browser with unusual settings can be *more* identifiable, not less.

Tracking pixels

A one-pixel image in an email or a page. Loading it tells the sender you opened the email, when, and roughly where. Most email apps now block remote images by default; if yours does not, turn it on.

Link decoration

The ?fbclid= or ?utm_source= on the end of an address. It carries an identifier across from one site to another, surviving cookie blocking entirely. Some browsers strip the worst of these automatically now.

What actually reduces it

• Use a browser that blocks third-party cookies by default and leave it on.
• Use a content blocker. uBlock Origin remains the honest answer. Blocking the request means the

script never runs, which stops fingerprinting at source.

• Block remote images in email.
• Sign in less. Being signed in to a large account while browsing hands over more than any

cookie does.

• Separate contexts. A different browser or profile for shopping and for everything else costs

nothing.

What a VPN does here

It hides your address and your traffic from your internet provider and from the network you are on. It does not stop cookies, fingerprinting or pixels — those happen inside your browser, which the VPN never touches.

Anyone selling a VPN as the answer to tracking is overselling. Use both: a VPN for the network layer, a content blocker for the browser. They solve different problems and neither replaces the other.