There has to be a clear division between using information for our own use to make decisions on purchasing items or visiting somewhere, and information that is gathered on us for nefarious purposes. Knowing what information is available to a website that we visit, and how they use that information is a bit of a grey area. However, whenever one opens any website these days we are bombarded with choices over whether to accept the cookies on their site and how to reject their use of some info and not others. I tend to choose to manually manage the cookie use. However, after much noise and activity in this country anyway, we have the data protection laws in place – these aim to restrict the wholesale use of our personal data so it is not sold off like every other commodoty. However when we visit any website, they can learn a lot more about us than we might realise. You can however use online tools to check what info is being collected about you and in which way this could be used to your detriment. There are tools there to identify which cookies are tracked and by whom. They follow our browsing history and tell us who is following our IP lookups to create browser fingerprinting.