First, it is wise to be wary of the big names. Norton, McAfee, Trend Micro, etc. Sadly, all of these products have become SO incredibly bloated over the last decade or so, and now most of them install boot-time level bloated services, that they themselves can affect the performance and function of your computer so badly, that I now consider these products themselves "virus-like" and "malware." Norton in particular, is egregious in how badly they affect the performance of your computer. Avoid at all costs.
I'll offer some tangential advice. I haven't had issues with viruses or malware or anything like that, in well over a decade. I used to, long in the distant past. The main thing I used to do back in the day, was download a TON of CRAP. Programs of all kinds. This is where most of the danger lies. Simply browsing around, is generally not going to result in malicious programs being silently downloaded and installed, unless you are browsing some particularly seedy sites from the dark corners of the web (or worse, the dark web itself.) Generally speaking, just browsing is a pretty darn safe endeavor these days, thanks to numerous security standards and policies that are implemented by the major browsers (although, Chrome is an interesting case, I'll get to that.)
The main concern about just browsing around these days, is "trackers." Rick shared a screenshot in post #5 which demonstrates a tracker. Trackers are everywhere, and pretty much every single interaction we make these days...viewing a search result on Google, Bing or Yahoo, clicking links, or clicking buttons, everything, usually results in tracking. Not just a little, the internet is the most massive and extensive system of surveillance and tracking ever devised. Thing is, it has been since the late 1990s, and you've been tracked for decades already.
Firefox, the browser I use about half the time, now has built-in on-by-default blocking of some of the most "egregious" trackers. This is where things like Rick shred in post #5 can appear. Firefox (and maybe other "safe" browsers like Brave, etc.) will now show you warnings like this, when it detects links you click that are silently and otherwise invisibly tracking you.
What is tracking really? Its the observation, analysis and recording of all your travels on the internet. Data brokers, like Google (this is REALLY what Google is...one of the world's largest trackers and data brokers), have long used machine learning (i.e. AI, although what we call AI thus far extremely primitive in the grand scheme of things, processes that operate by function of a generated neural net) to analyze all the information that has been gathered about every individual that uses the internet, and compile extensive and deep knowledge about each every said individual. Trackers & data brokers have known more about you, than you know about yourself, and they have known it all for a very long time already.
Continued tracking....if you continue to a route like trk.klclick.com...is probably not really going to change much, for the vast majority of people these days. Yes, IMO, this kind of silent, generally invisible tracking is vile, despicable, evil and exhibits the utter degeneracy of the majority of what goes on online. But its been going on for so long, and enough information has already been compiled on everyone who uses the internet for pretty much anything, that any more, isn't really going to give the people who know about and use this information (primarily advertisers, but the data is up for sale...for anyone who can afford it) much new information about you. Your general behavioral profiles, likes and dislikes, friends, family, significant others, places you live, have lived, would like to live, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. are all already known. Combine all this tracking, with the sad fact that email is also an utterly insecure form of communication (FWIW, email is sent "clear text" if its sent over any standard transport mechanism, such as SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) meaning not one single word of anything you have sent via email over the last...30 years...has ever been secure from prying eyes), and there is little the powers that be couldn't know about you already.
The thing that has changed today, primarily thanks to the new default settings in Firefox and some other browsers like Brave, is that now you are being ALERTED to the FACT that tracking IS occurring. That's what a url like trk.klclick.com from post #5 represents...it represents a tracker. Normally, you would have no clue that this tracking was occurring. Thanks to an old foundational aspect of how HTTP (the HyperText Transport Protocol) works, something called the 302 redirect, you could in fact be silently routed through a whole series of tracking urls, and normally you would never know it. You could have a dozen different tracking systems track information about you between the time you click some link on some Website X, before you arrive on Website Y, and all this happens so fast that you just don't know it. Firefox, or other more secure browsers like Brave, alerting you to the fact that you are being tracked, is just taking away the transparency of the process, and making the hidden known now.
Now, trk.klclick.com specifically? This is generally an email click tracker. There are a lot of these. A lot of other mechanisms are used to track your usage of emails as well. PSI, for example, is most likely using a third party service to send out their emails. These services, such as SendGrid, Mail Chimp, Mailgun, and many others all employ some fairly standard techniques to keep track of how many people actually see and use your marketing emails. When emails are sent through such services, every link you may configure in your emails is usually "Wrapped" in a tracking link, which will track which link was clicked by which individual at what time. Then it will route you to the actual url, such as a pen kit on PSI's web site. But this is only one aspect of email tracking. Email tracking will also rely on invisible images, usually a single pixel sized transparent image, that comes from another tracking url specific to you. Every single email sent to each individual, gets its own unique tracking image (or in fact, sometimes many, for tracking whether you just viewed the top of the email, or scrolled and viewed more, or even scrolled to the very bottom). This allows mass mailers like Mail Chimp to track down to the individual who's been emailed, usually by associating with your email address.
At a GENERAL level, this kind of tracking is generally harmless. It lets PSI know if you even bother to read their emails, and whether you ever click on anything. Over the long term, if you don't even open an email for moths, then they might choose to send you fewer emails...as usually, mass email marketing costs on an email count basis. If PSI was sending daily emails to thousands of users who rarely if ever actually even open them, then they would be wasting money. Tracking like this can go even deeper, and integrate with tracking that can be built into their web site itself, so that on an individualized basis, they can not only figure out how often you use their marketing emails, but what kinds of links you click on, for what kinds of products. They can track what kind of products you usually browse on their webs site, and all the various bits of tracking information they have can be used to help them send you emails that would be more relevant to you. This increases the chances that each individual WILL open the email, and WILL click on the links within, to actual products that each individual is more likely to buy.
Tracking can get extremely deep, extremely detailed, and it can be used in ways that sometimes are hard for humans to comprehend even. A lot of it is downright vile, given how much some other unknown dark individual could potentially figure out about anyone these days. But a lot of it, it usually used in ways that are rather benign. What PSI is doing, is trying to maximize the effectiveness of the money they spend on their marketing efforts.
That isn't inherently evil.... I personally don't like being tracked, but, at the end of the day, I guess if I'm going to receive an email, I'd rather it be an email that makes sense for me to get, rather than something that will never contain anything of use and just clutters up my inbox.
For the most part, I think most of us here, can continue to use links from emails from PSI, Exotic Blanks, Cook Woods, WoodTurningZ, etc. etc. without any real concern. For one, all of us have been so deeply and thoroughly tracked throughout our travels about the internet for so long already, having additional information tracked these days isn't going to change much. Further, its probably better to have more relevant emails sent to you, than irrelevant ones, and I think we all generally like the places we buy our materials from, and would like them to continue to succeed in their businesses. The kind of tracking PSI or EB might utilize is by and large harmless, for what they would use it for, which is ultimately to tell us relevant products that we like.
