Tracking User Activity

Reporters from The Wall Street Journal revealed that the most commonly visited sites are tracking the behavior of their online users. The Wall Street Journal identified over 100 companies and advertisers collecting user data and selling it on a stock-market exchange.

Cookies
A cookie is a small text file which is stored on the user’s computer either temporarily (for one online session) or permanently on the hard drive. Cookies gather data about the user’s online activity and allow for the website to monitor and track user preferences. This is one way advertisers and marketers profile and target potential customers. For instance, a user could visit a sporting goods site with enabled cookies and see a noticeably higher number of ads for that sporting goods website. This is particularly prevalent on social media sites such as Facebook.

Beacons
A web beacon is similar to a cookie. It is a small, transparent image located on a webpage  which monitors and tracks preferences of users on that website and trace their IP address. Web beacons can be detected in the website’s source code by searching for image tags which load from a different server.

Users are given ID numbers and names remain anonymous to the data companies. The big question being asked here is if this is too intrusive regardless of whether they have your name or not, since these companies have a wealth of other information about you and Many users are unaware their activity is being tracked.

Disable Tracking Software
As a user you are able to disable cookies in your web browser by going to the browser’s settings and blocking them (you may want to search how to do so). You can also download additional software to block browser trackers including cookies and beacons. By disabling a browser’s cookies, beacons will also be disabled and any detailed information about your site visit will not be available.

Related Pages
Behavioral targeting