Chapter 4. How
Websites
Invade Your Privacy
Surfing the Web may feel like a solitary
experience, but in fact, every time you visit a new website, that
website gathers information about you. The information might be
innocuoushow many pages you visit on the site, for example. But it
might be not-so
innocuous
as well. The site may track every page
you visit and the amount of time you
spend
on each page. It might
examine your IP address and find out your geographic location and
your place of work. And it may gather a lot more information and be
able to put together a surprisingly sophisticated and complete
profile of who you are and your personal interests. So, how is this
done?
In some instances, the site may use this
information to better deliver information to youit might customize
which pages it shows to you, depending on your past surfing habits
on the site, for example. The site may customize the ads it
delivers to you as well.
But it might do more with that information as
well, which can be
disturbing
. It might be able to create a
complete profile of you and then sell that information to
advertisers, other websites, or the highest bidder. When
information like this from a website is combined with offline
databases with profiles about you (such as what you've bought at
particular stores), an extremely complete profile about you can be
built.
Three technologies are often used to track your
web activitiescookies, web tracking, and web
bugs
.
Cookies
are
bits of data put on a hard disk when someone
visits
certain
websites. There are
legitimate
uses for cookiesfor example, they
make it easier for people to use websites that require a username
and password. The cookie on the hard disk has the username and
password on it, so people don't have to log in to every page that
requires that information. Instead, the cookie sends the
information to the server and the person can visit the page
freely
.
Cookies can contain many kinds of information,
such as the last time a person visited the site, the person's
favorite sites, and similar information. They can be used to track
people as they go through a website and to help gain statistics
about which types of pages people like to visit.
Although cookies can be used to track how people
use a website, many other methods can be used, as well. In one
method, web server logs are examined in detail. This would make it
possible, for example, to identify the most popular pages on the
site, the sites people have just visited, how many pages people
read in a typical visit, and similar information. Other
methods
include using software
sniffers
that examine every packet coming into or going out of a website.
Webmasters can use this tracking information to help create better
sitesbut they can also use it to assemble demographic information
to sell to advertisers.
Web bugs
can
also trace people's paths through a website. Web bugs get their
name
not in reference to an error in a program, but instead from
the
term
to
bug
as in "to wiretap."
More dangerously, web bugs can be included in email, and they can
actually enable people to view some of your email.
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