Google and Apple said they were taking steps to help users shield themselves from hundreds of companies which collect profiles based on online behavior. At the same time, others are planning new ways to get into our daily lives more.

In January, Google said they will phase out third-party cookies on their Chrome browser to make it difficult for advertisers to track our browsing habits. Publishers and advertisers use cookies  to gather our shopping, browsing and search data to compile extensive user profiles. These profiles shows our political interests, health, shopping behavior, race, gender and more. However, Google will still collect data from their own search engine and sites like YouTube or Gmail.

Meanwhile, Apple said they will require apps to ask users before tracking them in their new iOS version. After Facebook has complained about it, even though they moved the effective date to next year, a poll from June showed that as much as 80% of the participants would opt in to such tracking.