Hands-on review: Norton Anti Track 19 software

More of us are concerned about your online activities and digital footprint being tracked. Most of this happens within web browsers and using a 30-year-old technology called cookies.

These cookies are lodged into your browser when you visit certain websites, and they can then be used to track you going forward and onto other websites.

Some of these cookies are specific to a website, and others, like cookies from Facebook, are tracked across many websites.

The tracking enables companies to target advertising to you, track your browsing history, collect your personal information and personalise your experience on certain websites.

Norton has been a leader in the anti-virus space for many years, and a natural extension of this is to protect your identity online.

Its Anti Track 19 software was introduced in March 2022. It helps prevent this tracking of your identity by obscuring website cookies and fingerprinting attempts.

Essentially you can then browse the internet anonymously.

"As people spend more time online than ever before, we're seeing increasing interest in how to protect online privacy. Yet, despite many of the online privacy tools available, most companies can still identify us via unique characteristics that create a fingerprint. In fact, the largest trackers know about 50 percent of browsing history for nearly all online users," said Darren Shou, head of technology, NortonLifeLock.

In addition to cookie tracking, your browser sends a lot of other information to a website owner. Things like the size of your screen, your browser extensions, which fonts are available to use etc. These all come together into 'fingerprinting' technologies which enables you to be identified by website owners without cookies. Norton Anti Track also helps obscure this type of tracking.

In modern browsers, you can already go into incognito or private mode. This does prevent the tracking of cookies, but Norton Anti Track takes it a lot further and prevents other types of fingerprinting.

"With Norton AntiTrack, we're delivering new ways to help put control back in the hands of consumers so they can help protect their online privacy," said Shou.

We found the software easy to install, and it didn't slow down our web browsing experience.

It supports Google Chrome, Firefox and Microsoft Edge web browsers, but only on Windows 10 or 11 PCs.

A subscription costs $65 in Australia and $70 in New Zealand. A 60-day money-back guarantee is included.