After we read these types of stories, we might take a step back and nod thoughtfully about how bad it all seems. Maybe we install an ad blocker. Many people shrug it off as an inevitability of modern life. The tools that monitor ad trackers are growing increasingly available and (sometimes) user-friendly. It’s worth installing them.

The most accessible way to monitor trackers is with the Firefox web browser. A recent update added a weekly report card page that shows how many trackers Firefox blocks. You can click a shield icon in Firefox’s URL bar when visiting any site to see what type of tracking content a site uses. A running ticker is nice, but the data can still be hard to parse, because Firefox doesn’t explain what each tracker means. For example, on the home page of Wirecutter, a New York Times-owned website, Firefox shows a tracker from something called Optimizely. Digging around and talking to Wirecutter’s data team, I learned it’s an innocuous and common tool used to test different versions of a page (like A/B testing).

Still, as dense as the data may be, it’s fascinating to see just how many trackers you can collect every day. Firefox isn’t the only option for seeing this type of data, but it’s the easiest to understand. If Firefox isn’t for you, a browser extension like Privacy Badger or Disconnect displays trackers on each site, while the privacy-focused web browser Brave keeps a running total of the ads and trackers it blocks.

Our desktop and laptop computers are only a small portion of what we connect to the internet. We also have phones, televisions, video game consoles, smart speakers and more. If you’re mildly technically inclined, you can track all of this too.

If you want to see what all of your connected devices are doing online, check out the Princeton IoT Inspector. You can run the software on a Mac, but it’s better suited to the Raspberry Pi, a $35 tiny computer that runs a variation of the open-source Linux operating system. Once installed, IoT Inspector constantly monitors the traffic into and out of your network, then displays it on a dashboard. Using IoT Inspector, I found that my older-generation Samsung TV, which can barely pull itself together long enough to launch Netflix, frequently pings a site I assume is Samsung’s Automatic Content Recognition software, which can track what you’re watching by reading pixels to identify shows.