Why I made a course about being watched

By October I had spent months inside a browser engine, and I had seen how much a normal web page does while you read it. Requests go out to companies you have never heard of. Small scripts work out who you are. Most of it happens in the time it takes the page to appear.

What stayed with me was how invisible it is. I could block it in Floati, and I do. But blocking it quietly felt like only half of the job.

Why not just block it

A blocker makes the problem disappear from your screen. It does not tell you what was happening. I kept thinking about how differently I look at the web now that I can see this, and how few people get the chance.

Blocking a tracker helps you once. Understanding one stays with you.

On 30 October 2026 I planned The Watched Web, and it went live the same day. It is the second Floati Learn course: 156 lessons, in eight legs. You see what a tracker learns about you, you watch the browser break it, and then you build the blocker yourself.

A line I drew

The hardest part to write was the section on trackers themselves. To teach how they work, you have to get close to how they are built, and I was not comfortable teaching people to build one. So that part is about analysing trackers, not making them. It would have been easier to skip the question. I am glad I did not.

The same thinking runs through the browser. Some newer web features exist to run ad targeting and measurement inside the browser. Floati does not have them, and that is on purpose. I am not interested in hosting the auction.

Why it is a course

It would have been simpler to write a long article. But Floati Learn works because you do the thing yourself, and this subject needs that more than most. Reading that you are being tracked is easy to shrug off. Seeing your own request leave the page is not.

I do not want people to feel afraid of the web. I love the web. I want them to feel that they understand it, and that they have a choice.

Talk about this post on the forum