Ad trackers aren’t just a threat to your privacy – they can making browsing a drag by doubling page load times according to a survey by online privacy company Ghostery.
Researchers used a custom-built web crawler to analyze the top 500 websites in the US (as determined by Alexa) – once using Ghostery’s tracker blocking browser extension, and once without.
First, be proactive in protecting your own privacy
Jeremy Tillman, Ghostery
Without trackers blocked, just 17% of pages loaded within five seconds. Over 60% took longer than 10 seconds, and nearly 5% took over a minute. When trackers were blocked, the average page load time dropped by over half. Ghostery calls this difference the ‘tracker tax’ – and it’s not the only price to pay for ‘free’ sites.
There’s a whole ecosystem built up around trackers, which were present in 90% of the web pages crawled. They work by gathering snippets of information about you that might not be worth much on their own, but combine to create a detailed picture of you as an individual – your location, income, nationality, marital status, political views and more.
This is all tied together with a piece of personally identifying information like an email address that you use across multiple sites, making a package that’s a valuable tool for advertisers that enables them to target you with laser precision.
Stopping trackers
It’s a whole industry, so how can you take down trackers, protect your privacy and speed up page load times?
“First, be proactive in protecting your own privacy,” Jeremy Tillman, director of product at Ghostery, tells TechRadar. “A lot’s been said recently about GDPR, but even with these regulations in place, it doesn’t solve the core problem of businesses built around your data.”
Your phone can not only monitor what you see, it can also track where you are and which places you visit
Jeremy Tillman, Ghostery
Naturally Tillman advises using a tracker blocker like Ghostery, but he also recommends checking sites’ privacy settings and possibly using a VPN to hide your location, providing an extra layer of anonymity.
He also suggests using a third-party web browser with tracking protection for mobile devices.
“That’s really essential because your phone can not only monitor what you see, it can also track where you are and which places you visit,” he says.
Using a third-party browser with built-in tracker blocking will also give you better protection on the desktop.
If you’re looking for a privacy-first mobile browser, there are several options to choose from, including Cliqz by Ghostery’s parent company, and Firefox Focus.
Cat and mouse
Tillman describes blocking trackers the traditional wau as a game of cat-and-mouse. “Trackers are always changing,” he says, “and if we don’t have one in our database, we can’t block it.
“To address this, we have a new AI tracker filter. This works in a different way, detecting trackers in real time – even ones that aren’t in our database. Rather than blocking them, it scrubs the data that’s being sent, stripping out personal information like your email address.” Ghostery has also added an ad-blocker that works in a similar way.
Some of the bigger browser developers, including Google, are taking steps to minimize the impact of ads on everyday browsing, but their built-in tools are only designed to block the most egregious of advertisers.
Ghostery’s conclusion is clear: you might already be aware of trackers’ impact on your privacy, but speed can also take a real hit – and you’ll have to take matters into your own hands to avoid it. After all, your time is money.
Getting hold of an email account is easy. Sign up with an ISP and you’ve got one account for starters. Creating an account with Google and other big names will get you more. Buy a decent web hosting package and you’ll probably get enough email addresses to power a large business, all for no extra charge.
Getting the right email account is more difficult, as there’s a lot to consider. What are the spam filters like? How easy is it to keep your inbox organized? Can you access the account from other email clients? And what about using the service with a custom domain and address of your own (yourname@yourdomain.com)?
Keep reading and we’ll highlight some of the best email providers around. All have decent free services, perhaps with ads and some limits, but we’ll also talk about their business-friendly commercial products which deliver the power, functionality and enterprise-level extras that demanding users need.
First released back in 2004, Google’s Gmail has become the market leader in free email services with more than a billion users across the globe.
Gmail’s stripped-back web interface is a highlight. Most of the screen is devoted to your inbox, with a minimum of toolbar and other clutter. Messages are neatly organized via conversations for easier viewing, and you can read and reply to emails with ease, even as a first-time user.
There’s plenty of power here. Messages can be automatically filtered into tabbed categories like Primary, Social and Promotions, helping you to focus on the content you need. Leading-edge spam blocking keeps your inbox free of junk, you can manage other accounts from the same interface (Outlook, Yahoo, any other IMAP or POP email), and there’s 15GB storage for your inbox, Drive and photos.
Other features are more questionable. Instead of organizing messages into folders, for instance – a simple metaphor which just about every user understands – you must filter them using a custom labelling system. This works, and has some advantages, but isn’t popular with all users. Still, Gmail is an excellent service overall, and a good first choice for your email provider.
Google makes a paid business-oriented version of Gmail available in the shape of its G Suite product.
This more professional product drops the ads and allows using a custom email address on your domain (yourname@yourcompany.tld). Business-oriented migration tools can import mail from Outlook, Exchange, Lotus and more. Storage space doubles to 30GB on the Basic plan, and you get unlimited group email addresses, 99.9% guaranteed uptime and 24/7 support.
G Suite is Google’s answer to Microsoft Office, so of course you also get apps for working with documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Shared calendars keep you better organized, there’s video and voice conferencing for online meetings, and again, there’s 24/7 support to keep your system running smoothly.
This more Office-like power makes for a more expensive product than the email-only competition, with prices starting at $5 (£3.60) a user for the simplest plan. You’re getting a lot for your money, though, and if you’ll use G Suite’s features then it could be a smart choice. A 14-day free trial provides an easy way to help you find out.
There’s plenty of power here, especially for Office 365 users
Focused Inbox is a smart feature
Powerful events and calendar-related abilities
Raft of app-based integrations
Outlook’s web interface follows the same familiar style as its desktop incarnation, and most other email clients: folders and organizational tools on the left, the contents of the current folder in the center, and a simple preview pane on the right (with adverts in the case of the free account).
A toolbar gives you speedy access to common features, and right-clicking folders or messages shows you just about everything else. If you’ve ever used another email client, you’ll figure out the key details in moments.
Despite the apparent simplicity, there’s a lot going on under the hood. The service automatically detects important emails and places them in a Focused Inbox, keeping any distractions out of sight. Events including flights and dinner reservations can automatically be added to your calendar. It’s easy to share that calendar with other Outlook.com or Office 365 users, or you can save your events to a Family calendar that everyone can access.
Excellent attachment support includes the ability to directly share OneDrive files as copies or links. You can also attach files directly from your Google Drive, Dropbox and Box accounts, and a chunky 15GB mailbox allows storing plenty of files from other people.
This all worked just fine for us, but if you’re unhappy with the service defaults, there’s a chance they can be tweaked via Outlook.com’s Settings dialog. This doesn’t have quite as many options as Gmail, but they’re well organized and give you plenty of control over layout, attachment rules, message handling and more.
If that’s still not enough, Microsoft offers a bunch of app-based integrations to take the service further. You get built-in Skype support via the beta, and apps give you easier access to Evernote, PayPal, GIPHY, Yelp, Uber and more.
Upgrading to Office 365 gets you an ad-free inbox, 50GB mail storage and a vast 1TB of OneDrive storage. Extras include offline working, professional message formatting tools and phone or chat-based support. Oh, and the latest versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. All this can be yours for the equivalent of $7 (£5) a month on the single user Office 365 Personal plan or you can pay 70$ (£52) for a year.
A powerful offering with some surprisingly neat extras
Useful extras like disposable email addresses
1TB of inbox storage
Not as many low-level options as rivals
Yahoo Mail doesn’t make the headlines so much, these days, but its latest version is a polished and professional service which stands up well against the top competition.
The well-designed interface resembles Gmail, at least initially, with a large view of your inbox, one-click filters for common messages and content (Photos, Documents, Travel), and easy browsing of all the emails in a conversation. But you can also organize mails into custom folders, and the layout can be tweaked to display a message preview in a couple of clicks.
A powerful underlying engine can integrate with Facebook, supports sending SMS and text messages, is accessible via web, POP and (in some situations) IMAP, and can forward email to another address. Valuable extras include disposable email addresses to protect your privacy, and a mammoth 1TB of mailbox storage means you can keep just about everything you receive, for a very long time.
Demanding users might find issues, over time. Mail organization can’t quite match the flexibility of Gmail’s labelling scheme, for instance, and there aren’t nearly as many low-level tweaks, settings and options as you’ll often see elsewhere. But overall, Yahoo Mail is an appealing service which needs to be on your email shortlist.
As with other providers, Yahoo offers a Business Mail plan with more features. The highlight is an option to use the service with a custom domain (yourname@yourdomain.com), although there are other advantages, too. The service can import contacts from Facebook, Gmail, Outlook and more. You can view all your mailboxes on the same screen, and there are all the usual business-friendly productivity tools (multiple calendars, document handling, analytics and more).
Prices start from $3.19 (£2.30) per mailbox per month, billed annually, and they drop as you add mailboxes – $1.59 (£1.15) for 5, $1.19 (£0.85) for 10, and for 20+ you’ll need to contact them.
There’s even a free domain name included, and not just the initial registration: Yahoo will also renew it for as long as your subscription is active.
Signing up with an email provider will often involve some privacy compromises. Yahoo Mail asks for your name and mobile number, for instance. Gmail and other services might scan your messages to carry out useful actions (such as adding events to calendars), and just about everyone serves you with ads.
ProtonMail is a Swiss-based email service which focuses on privacy above all else. You can sign up anonymously, there’s no logging of IP addresses, and all your emails are end-to-end encrypted, which means there’s no way ProtonMail (or anyone else) can read their contents.
There are some significant limits. The free product has a tiny 500MB storage space, only supports sending 150 messages a day, and is distinctly short in terms of organizational tools (no folders, labels or smart filters). As the end-to-end encryption is specific to ProtonMail, it also ensures that you can’t use the service with other email clients.
Still, it seems a little unfair to complain about a service which is no-strings-attached free, and doesn’t even show ads. In reality, ProtonMail is a specialist tool which is intended for use alongside services like Gmail – not to replace them – and overall it performs its core tasks very well.
If you do need more, ProtonMail’s $5 (you can choose to pay in USD, Euro and CHF) a month (or 48$ yearly) Plus account gives you 5GB storage, a 1,000 message-per-day allowance, custom domains (you@yourdomain.com) and support for folders, labels and filters.
A further Business plan brings more storage, email addresses and a second custom domain, as well as adding a catch-all email address and multi-user support. It’s priced from $8 per month per user (75$ yearly), which is reasonable if you need ProtonMail’s security, although it’s also notably more expensive than the business accounts of the big-name competition.
An email provider that gives you a lot for, well, nothing
Free plan allows up to 25 users
Freebie has features normally only in paid plans
Also boasts office and collaboration tools
Zoho Workplace is a business-oriented email service which throws in an online office suite, document management, and a host of collaboration tools and other extras.
Zoho’s free plan supports up to 25 users (there’s an extra 25 available if you can refer others to the service. Update: they are currently remodeling the referral program so this isn’t available at the moment), each with 5GB of mailbox storage, and can be used with one domain of your own. These are features you’ll normally only find in commercial products, and when you factor in the spreadsheet, word processor, presentation and other tools, it looks like a real bargain.
The email service is easy-to-use, and provides a decent set of features to help organize your emails: folders, tags, filters, smart searches, and more.
The free plan is still a little basic. It gives you web access only, for instance, and there’s no support for email forwarding.
Fortunately, the Zoho Standard plan fixes that. A mere $2 (£1.45) per user (paid annually) gets you IMAP and POP access, email forwarding, active sync, multiple domain hosting, domain aliases, 30GB storage, a 30MB attachment limit (up from 25MB with the free plan) and some major improvements elsewhere (the ability to send cloud files to non-Zoho users, for instance). You also have Pro and Enterprise plans available, which add more features.
A number of these features are available elsewhere for free, of course, but businesses or anyone who will use the custom domain support or Office tools will find a lot to like here. Well worth a closer look.
The official Amazon Prime Day 2018 date in the US is July 16 and 17, according to our exclusive reporting and now confirmed by the retailer. It’s less than two weeks away from today, and getting closer every minute.
We expect a surge in Prime Day deals on Amazon.com over the course of the 36-hour span, so many that you’ll need an in-depth guide – so we created a list of what will likely be on sale for it.
It’s going to be the best time to buy Amazon Echo speakers and a brand new 4KTV, as Amazon promises to offer discounts that rival Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It’s become an increasingly important online shopping day in America.
It’ll outpace the ongoing 4th of July Sales (which you should still check out today and tomorrow), but you might have questions: How long will it last? What time does Prime Day start? What items will see deep discounts? What are the best Prime Day deals for 2018? We’ve created an in-depth guide in time for July 16.
Sure, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is doing you a favor with Prime Day 2018, but it’s also the retailer’s chance to install Echo speakers, Fire tablets, and Fire TVs in your home so that you continue paying for that ever-important Amazon Prime subscription.
Here’s how to get the best prices out of your Prime membership this month.
When is Amazon Prime Day?
Now we know for sure. We always figured it would be this month, but plot twist: Amazon Prime Day 2018 starts at noon Monday, July 16 in the US and lasts until midnight on Tuesday 17th. We got the scoop when Amazon Prime Day is through an exclusively we discovered via a banner image uploaded to Amazon’s site. Amazon just confirmed this news on Tuesday, July 3.
It’s one week later than Amazon’s previous Amazon Prime Day outings, but means you’ll have slightly more time to save up your hard-earned dollars for it. The Amazon Prime Day start time and end times are Pacific time, since Amazon’s headquarters is in Seattle.
What deals can we expect on Prime Day 2018?
The best Amazon Prime Day always surround its own products, so that means we’re in for deals on Amazon Echo speakers. We anticipate all-time low priced for $50 Echo Dot ($25 maybe?) and the Amazon Echo Spot (fingers crossed for $80). The latter will be entering its first-ever Prime Day.
Besides nearly guaranteed Amazon Echo deals, you can anticipate other Amazon gadgets on sale: Kindles, Fire TV Sticks, and Fire Tablets. The unmentioned goal of Prime Day is to sneak as many Amazon products and services into your home as possible.
And that Amazon Fire TV Cube that was just announced in the US for $119.99 could get a warm reception on Amazon Prime Day, luring new customers into the Amazon Prime family. We predict Amazon may have an epic discount if you buy two of these, as it has done for Echo Show speakers in the past. We’ve hold off on buying, as we’ve noted in Why we’re waiting until Amazon Prime Day to buy the Fire TV Cube.
Nintendo Switch may be getting its first big discounts for Amazon prime Day even though it was only recently that it was nearly impossible to buy in stores. We’re even more certain that PS4 and Xbox One console bundles will see a price drop, or at least come with more value-added games to sweeten existing bundle deals. Microsoft’s Xbox One X and Sony’s PS4 Pro are competing heavily, which is no doubt good for everyone else on a day like Prime Day 2018. That’s why we’ve also written about waiting for an Xbox One X Prime Day deal.
Philips Hue bulbs are a great way to upgrade your home into a smart home. That can be expensive at full price, so we’re waiting until July 16 and 17 to see how many of the multi-colored lighting solutions we can scoop up.
Cheap 4K TVs are a staple of every sales holiday, and Amazon Prime Day is no different here. We’re already running a US cheap TV page. Expect even lower prices from manufacturers like Samsung, LG, and TCL, to name a few..
The Echo and Echo Dot were the most-bought items last Prime Day
What is Amazon Prime Day?
Amazon Prime Day is the retailer’s big members-only summer sale and it’s been a massive success in the few short years it’s been going. If you want to get involved with the best discounts though, you’ll need to be a member of Amazon Prime. With free next-day delivery on thousands of items and the excellent Amazon Instant Video streaming service being just two of the membership’s key highlights, millions of you are already signed up.
Brilliantly though, you can always sign up for a free 30-day trial to take advantage of the sale and other membership benefits. And if you don’t want to continue the service after Prime Day, just cancel the trial before the 30 days are up. Amazon know too well that many shoppers will find it hard to say goodbye to those super perks though.
Amazon Prime 30-day trial
Prime gets you free superfast delivery, exclusive deals, video and music streaming and lots more. There’s a no-commitment 30-day free trial too, which you can get by signing up to Prime here:
More people signed up for Prime on Prime Day last year than on any other day in Amazon’s history. As of April 2018, Amazon confirmed it had passed 100 million subscribers for Amazon Prime, that’s up from around 80 million before Prime Day last year and 58 million in 2016. That’s some pretty incredible year-on-year growth for the last few years. We wouldn’t be surprised to see Amazon Prime’s 2018 numbers grow dramatically again by the time Prime Day arrives.
Amazon also reported that sales via the Amazon app more than doubled year-on-year and “tens of millions of people” used the app to buy items last Prime Day.
So is Amazon Prime Day just another Black Friday? Actually, no. As Amazon puts it, Black Friday is largely about gifts for other people (it’s ok, we had a laugh at that too) – it takes place just at the start of the Christmas shopping season – but Prime Day is all about treating yourself.
The overwhelming majority of decent deals on Prime Day were on things you might buy for yourself or for your home. As you’ll see from the best sellers there were lots of smart home devices sold to Prime customers as well as quite a lot of kitchen gear. There were good deals on laptops and consoles too of course, but they were alongside deals on hammocks, juicers, robot vacuum cleaners and pressure cookers.
Amazon Prime Day 2018: how long will it last?
We know what you’re thinking: Amazon turned Black Friday into Black Friday Deals Week, so there’s no way it would limit Prime Day to just 24 hours. And you’d be right. Last year’s Prime Day was 30 hours long starting at 9pm the night before and lasting until 3am the day after. We wouldn’t be surprised to see Prime Day 2018 last even longer. Prime Day 2022 may well start before Prime Day 2021 finishes.
Prime Day: do Amazon’s rivals respond?
They did. It was Free Slurpee Day at 7-Eleven and Cow Appreciation Day at Chick-fil-A, which offered free food to anybody in an animal costume. Meanwhile eBay threw some shade, with a front page claiming that “Their Prime Deal Is Our Everyday Deal”.
According to research firm Bazaarvoice, 76% of US Prime Day shoppers visited rival retailers to check whether they were getting the best deals. And as PwC Consumer Markets analyst Steve Barr told CNBC, “We are seeing other big box retailers use Prime Day as an opportunity to capture shoppers’ appetite for deals and as way to compete against Amazon for share of wallet and mindset.”
So we won’t just be calling out the best Prime Day deals at Amazon, we’ll keep an eye on all your favourite retailers to see what bargains they have. At the very least we expect some sneaky price matching from many stores like Walmart, Newegg and Jet in the US.
So are Prime Day deals really real?
As with any sale, some products are end of line stock or things that just aren’t selling (like all those shoddy TVs idiots fight over in supermarkets on Black Friday), but many deals are genuine. Let’s take a look at the US bestseller, the Instant Pot DUO80 pressure cooker. On Prime Day it was $90, and if you check its price history on CamelCamelCamel.com you’ll see that it was tracking at $129 for most of 2017. The camel site is pretty reliable and a great way to check how good a deal really is and it works. It’ll also show you how likely a price is to come back around again, meaning your spending budget might be better spent on something with a rarer discount on Prime Day itself.
Most popular Amazon Devices on Prime Day
There’s one big blip in the graph, though: on the 2nd of July it went up to $209.10, dropping back to $129 the following day. If you’re comparing the Prime Day price to the 2nd of July price then the saving is clearly illusory – but compare it to the normal selling price and it’s clearly still a good deal.
Checking other devices can be illuminating, though. Amazon’s Echo Dot is usually $49.99, but it dropped to $39.99 last June, May, December and on Black Friday. The Kindle Paperwhite price goes up and down more often than a kangaroo on a bouncy castle, moving from $119.99 to $99.99 every fortnight or so.
The lesson here, other than “don’t buy Amazon devices at full price”, is that you really need to know the value of what you’re looking at. Some deals, such as the pressure cooker, are genuine (and no doubt arranged with the supplier way in advance to trade margin for volume). Others aren’t necessarily deals you need to race to get, because the devices will be discounted again soon. And as with any sale, forget the RRP/MSRP when you’re looking at the sale price – especially on big ticket items such as televisions. The RRP on those only exists to give retailers a laugh.
Were there any Prime Day problems last year?
As you’d expect from an event this big, not everything went according to plan on Amazon Prime Day last year. Twitter featured many irate users who found that deals didn’t appear at the specified times, while others suggested that Amazon had a “bot problem” with some deals being oversubscribed instantly. Still, others had problems with the app, where deals weren’t sold out but the App’s Add To Cart button didn’t work. There were concerns over some of the deals too. Some deals were more expensive on Prime Day than they were normally, while other deals simply reproduced deals that had been available the day before. And still others were laughable: would an incredible four cents off the $1,799.99 price of a soundbar tempt you to buy? Problems didn’t end at the ordering stage either. While Amazon boasts about the fastest-ever Prime Day delivery of just 14 minutes between ordering and delivery, many of us saw our next-day or two-day deliveries become even longer.
Pro tip from us here at TechRadar: if any of your Amazon Prime delivery dates are longer than they should be, complain to Amazon and you might get something back. A free month of Prime added to your sub for example.
The Fire TV Stick was down to $34.99
Could Amazon do better?
We think so. One of the biggest problem with Prime Day was actually finding the deals, which involved wading through lots of irrelevant products: Amazon ordered its deals by categories, so for example you could choose Computers & Accessories but you couldn’t narrow the selection further to specific kinds of computers or accessories.
Finding interesting deals meant looking past an awful lot of Lightning cables. We’re here to make things easier for you though as we’ll provide a guide to the very best Amazon Prime Day deals, as it can be a right pain browsing the site if you’re not used to navigating it every single day like we are.
We were a bit disappointed to see deals we did want, such as Philips Hue bulbs, limited to single orders per customer. Presumably it’s to stop them ending up on eBay at a higher price, but Hue’s a system for smart homes, not a single smart lampshade.
The biggest problems were with availability and delivery, though. Amazon or its logistics partners appeared to underestimate demand, and while part of us thinks “fair enough”, the whole point of Prime is its fast delivery. And seeing Lightning Deals disappear before you had time to read them was particularly frustrating. Not everybody is accessing Amazon on a super-speedy broadband network, and logging into the mobile app at the right time to see the deal had already sold out was a particular torture for phone users.
What can we learn about Black Friday and Cyber Monday?
The short answer: not much. Prime Day may be a big deal, but it’s still small potatoes compared to the annual holiday extravaganza – and you can be sure that while many people still won’t have heard of Prime Day, they’re very familiar with Black Friday and maybe Cyber Monday too. Amazon isn’t going to let the Black Friday / Cyber Monday opportunity pass it by: Black Friday 2016 was the first billion-dollar shopping day for mobile payments, with a total of $3.34 billion sold in the US alone. Expect Amazon to be just as enthusiastic about Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2018 as it was for the last few years. Although truth be told, we reckon the Amazon device deals on Prime Day will be slightly better than Black Friday.
Last year tens of millions of Prime members made a purchase on Prime Day. That was a 50% increase year-on-year
What were the best Prime Day deals last year?
As ever, you can count on us to find the very best Amazon Prime Day deals. Last year’s best Prime Day deals included the PS4, high quality headphones and Oral-B toothbrushes. Other top deals included:
Amazon Devices: Echo speakers, Kindles, Fire TV Stick
Pressure cooker: the Instant Pot Duo80 cooker was $40 off
Philips Hue: smart bulbs were 50% off in US
LG OLED TV: $700 savings on 65-inch LG OLED TVs in the US
Amazon’s warehouse workers had a huge task ahead of them last year with an incredible number of items needing to be shipped for next day delivery via Amazon Prime.
Come back to TechRadar on Amazon Prime Day 2018 where we’ll once again be listing the best deals so you don’t have to suffer the pain of navigating the Amazon website!
