The original post got truncated, so This is edited so it all fits:

The question of online privacy is in the news quite a bit, lately. The truth is, it is not a new issue, and it is certainly not limited to the ones you are hearing about on the news. There are people who know far more about this than I do, but even for someone who knows very little, there are some things you can do to protect your privacy without completely disconnecting from the grid or donning a tinfoil hat.

Who is tracking me and why do I care?

There are THOUSANDS of companies tracking your information. The biggest ones are no surprise: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft--you get the idea. The results you get when you search for anything on the big search sites are all stored and tied to unique and trackable identifiers, and used to shape what you find when you search. Tracking cookies on most websites add to this information, as well, further shaping what you see when you search.

If you and I both perform the exact same search on Google, we will get different results because we have different patterns of searching for things in the past. The search engines reinforce our confirmation bias, and do so more and more with every little piece of information that you provide them. Why? They say it is to better provide you with relevant information. it is actually to provide you with relevant ADVERTISING to make the companies who buy their ads happy. The problem is that it also reinforces divisiveness and makes it easier for false news stories to propagate and poison society by turning groups of people with similar search habits against each other.

Have you ever noticed that you can shop for a product online, and then suddenly you start seeing advertising on other, totally unrelated websites for exactly the thing you have been shopping for--or a competitor's similar product? Ad tracking: Amazon and Facebook have hooks everywhere and they are watching you for that very reason. If you don't find that a bit creepy, then I suspect that you are in the minority.

As you may be learning in the news regarding a few of the offending tracking/analytics companies, it doesn't stop at search results and shopping. It affects your newsfeed on Facebook and other social media sites. If you like something on Facebook, Facebooks trackers help target "related" ads and information your direction--across the web, not just on Facebook.

A quick look at a few major sites reveals this (connecting to the websites using the Chromium web browser with a few privacy plugins and Adblock) with the ads and tracking set to trust the websites in question. This is how vulnerable you are and how many things are tracking your data:

CNN: 89 trackers !!!
Weather.com: 76 trackers (to see what the weather is doing? Really?)
MSNBC: 10 trackers
Fox News: 37 trackers
NPR: 12 trackers
BBC: 8 trackers
Youtube: 11 trackers
Instagram: 4 trackers
Agnostic.com: 5 trackers on this site. Why?

Short of going off-grid, what can I do about it?

RESEARCH FOR YOURSELF, just like you would any other product. Look at the following privacy-related search and browsing tools and put some thought into how they can protect your information, and at the same time, broaden your view of the world by eliminating confirmation bias in the tailored searches that we are spoon-fed.

Firstly, stop using Google, Bing, Yahoo and the like for your searches. They are data mining everything. Look at Duckduckgo and ixquick as alternatives. I have had good luck with both.

Second, make sure you are using a secure and up-to-date OPEN SOURCE browser. Chromium and Firefox are both open source so anyone can view the code and see exactly what the browser is doing and is capable of.

Now that you are using non-tracking search engines on a safer browser, what next? There are privacy add-ons. that can block the ads and trackers, as well as force encryption by using httpS whenever possible. A few to look into:

httpS Everywhere: Forces httpS so if a website offers a secure, encrypted connection, you use it by default.

Ghostery: Blocks a huge number of tracking devices that most websites use. Beware that some media players embedded in websites are trackers, too, so you may have to temporarily trust a tracker or a website to access some content.

Privacy Badger: Completely open source tracker/add blocker that learns as you go and gets better and better at blocking as you use it.

Adblock (and similar plugins): Directly blocks advertisements and with them, the cookies that are used to track you. Ghostery and Privacy Badger block SOME of them, and this fills in the gaps, depending on which blocklists you use.

Now get out there and get some of your privacy back, and if you have any suggestions, please share them here.