There are ways to guard against being tracked online

Sizmek, DataXu, Brilig. Ethnio Analytics, Audience Science, Datalicious DataCollector.

Some of the hundreds of Web trackers busily snooping as you browse the Internet are named with pointless puns or vague allusions to poetry. Others might sound more open about their aims - but only to those who know these trackers are looking.

How can you know? One way is to to install Ghostery, a track-the-trackers browser extension that offers a window - literally, a pop-up on your computer screen - showing who is watching what you do online.

If you're interested in protecting your online privacy - whatever is left of it - using Ghostery is a good first step, says Joseph Turow, a University of Pennsylvania scholar who studies how tracking and data analytics are shaping consumers' experience as they shop, search for news and opinion, or do almost anything else online.

Last week, I told you about a new study by Turow that challenges a premise long touted by "behavioral marketers": that consumers might not love that trackers and ad networks compromise their privacy, but they accept the intrusion as a fair exchange. Basically, the notion is that they get our data, albeit sometimes with a dubious assurance of anonymity, and we get such benefits as discounts and "more relevant ads."

In The Tradeoff Fallacy, published by Penn's Annenberg School for Communication, Turow and coauthors Michael Hennessy and Nora Draper reach a different conclusion. They say most Americans are unhappy with the trade-off but resigned to it, believing we're powerless to do anything to protect our online privacy.

What do experts like Turow do to protect theirs? Ghostery is one tool he uses, and it's also among the suggestions of Gabriel Weinberg, the privacy-minded founder of DuckDuckGo, a Paoli-based upstart that offers tracking-free Internet search.

I asked Turow and Weinberg what the rest of us can do to enhance our Internet privacy, short of using a full-fledged anonymizer such as Tor. Some of their suggestions:

Look under the hood. Ghostery is one easily accessible tool - you can find it among Add-Ons in Firefox or Extensions in Chrome, for instance, or download it from Ghostery.com for Safari or Internet Explorer. Though it can be set up to block tracking, Turow suggests starting with its "Alert Bubble" feature, which displays a list of trackers active on each site you visit - sometimes dozens on a single page.

"People are astounded when they see those tags - they're like meteors bombarding your computer," Turow says. "They don't tell you what they take and they don't tell you what they do with it, but Ghostery gives you a sense of the ecosystem in which we live."

Ghostery offers another option, whether to "Enable Ghostrank," that reflects its fence-straddling position in the industry. Formerly called Evidon and before that the Better Advertising Project, Ghostery promotes industry self-regulation. While it markets the Ghostrank data, it says it's interested only in the "tracking elements and the web pages on which they are found, not you or your browsing habits."

Weinberg also likes similar add-ons called Disconnect and Privacy Badger. If you use such tools to block tracking, as he does, you'll find that ads no longer seem to follow you around from site to site, a key indicator that you're being profiled.

Browse with DuckDuckGo. Buoyed by worries about government surveillance, Weinberg's 30-person company is on course to do more than three billion searches in 2015. Although its Web-crawling may not be as deep as Google's, it yields similarly impressive search results. Turow says many will find its benefits outweigh any limitations.

Weinberg says his site's lack of trackers - alongside the ubiquitous Google trackers - highlights a bigger difference. "People think of Google as a search engine, but really it's an advertising company," he says.

He also says there's evidence that tracking shapes Google results beyond the commercial sphere, where tracking fuels ever-more-sophisticated kinds of price discrimination.

"Two people can search for 'gun control' and get very different results," he says. "We think that's particularly pernicious, because people search political issues and think they get unbiased results."

Read privacy policies. If you really care about your privacy, consider Turow's homework assignments - seriously, they're so complex he's thinking of offering an undergrad course focused on reading them.

Sometimes, he'll refuse to shop at an online retailer "because I find the privacy policy really abhorrent," he says. "There are times you just can't help it. But sometimes, I just say, 'Goodbye.' "

A little old-fashioned marketplace resistance won't solve the multifront assault on your privacy. But it can't hurt.

215-854-2776@jeffgelles

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