Online Tracking
How You are Being Tracked Online
So we know that companies are constantly collecting our data when we're online, amassing a huge amount of data points to be sold to companies for advertising. (Learn more about surveillance capitalism here. But how exactly do they do that?
Cookies
We've all heard about cookies. They're the little pop-ups that appear on the bottom of your screen that you have to agree to in order to access their website. Often we click "Agree" without thinking, disregarding the consequences so that we can just go ahead and access the site we were trying to reach. But what are we actually agreeing to?Cookies are tiny files places on your computer by a browser whenever you visit a website, enabling the website to have access to some of your data. The data depends on the type of cookie a website uses. One kind of cookie is a session cookie, which are pretty much harmless. Session cookies allow us to move different parts of a website without having to constantly relog-in. Session cookies also only last as long as your current session is active, and the cookie exits as soon as you exit your browser. Persistent cookies are different. Once they are placed on your computer, they stay on your computer. Persistent cookies are primarily used by the marketing firms to track your browsing history. The data they collect result in targeted advertisements that seem to follow you wherever you go.
Browser Fingerprinting
Browser fingerprinting is another, likely less known method for online tracking. A browser fingerprint is a hash of collected data that can be used to identify your device/you. The browser can collect this data because webservers can send a snippet of JavaScript code to our devices, which our device then executes. Once executed, the code can be used to identify different kinds of info about your device, such as: make and model of the device, time zone, installed Plugins, how your device renders different web elements. While separately this may seem random, if a snippet of code can collect enough unique data points, they can create a profile for your device which can be used to identify it with extreme accuracy. Browser fingerprints allow you to be tracked across different sites if multiples sites share your fingerprint, and in this way a website doesn't need to create a cookie to store your data. In addition, a typical prevention method such as a VPN, would only change 1 data point and ultimately not be effective.
So They've Got Our Data: Now they use Lookalike Analysis
Once advertisers have collected all our data they use it to build a model for their ideal customer, using the data of real world "superusers" or "positive users" and "negative users" to come up with an optimal set of data points that they could use to target their advertisements. They use this optimum data to calculate the difference between a normal user's data and comparing thw two. This together is used to formulate the best advertising campaign for a company.While stopping online tracking all together is impossible, it is important for users to be made aware so that they may become more informed users. To learn about some steps you can take to have a more secure online experience, visit this article.
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