Which? said firms are gathering far more data than needed for products to function

From the article:

The consumer champion Which? found companies appear to be gathering far more data than is needed for products to function. This includes smart TVs that ask for users’ viewing habits and a smart washing machine that requires people’s date of birth. Rocio Concha, director of policy and advocacy at Which?, said: “Consumers have already paid for smart products, in some cases thousands of pounds, so it is excessive that they have to continue to ‘pay’ with their personal information.”

  • Apathy Tree@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    You could check out ghostery bowser if it’s available, it has a pretty robust design for trackers. Idk if it would be a privacy score, persey but it tells you all about the trackers it sees on the site, what they are for, how often they are seen, etc. (like a space dot com article had 71 total trackers: 46 advertising trackers, 9 site analytics, 6 cdn, 3 auto video player, 2 misc, 2 essential, 2 social media, and 1 hosting). If you click into the details it gives a hefty report of who is collecting the data, so it breaks down who each of the 46 advertising trackers are, for example.

    It’s not forgiving at all, in my experience. But the iOS ghostery dawn browser hasn’t been updated in a while (in favor of their safari extension) and I’m not sure what the android version is like.

    Might be worth a look if that’s something you are interested in. The dawn browser also lets you open everything in ghost tabs by default, and when you clear those, it clears all trackers that may have been set. It also seems to spoof location information, because every site I visit thinks I’m from a different part of the country.