Analysing personal information
Introduction
information about you is being gathered all the time! Each time you set up an account online, your details are being harvested by someone. Your mobile phone company could be logging where you are and what apps you are using. If you have credit cards, debit cards, loyalty cards or any other type of card, your buying habits and spending habits can be available for analysis. Every account you have, for a utility bill, for insurance, for a membership of a gym or other club, going to school, having a job, registering with a doctor or to vote and so on all could potentially be harvested, analysed and sold on to advertisers. Information about you is valuable and the business of collecting data about you to use is often be called one of the fasted growing areas on the Internet!
Cookies and beacons
A cookie is a text file deposited onto your computer by a website that you have been to. When you next visit the website, the cookie detects that you have been there before and can display content based on what has been accessed previously or can retrieve information entered last time, such as personal details or account details. Cookies can often speed up your Internet experience. Beacons keep track of how you move through a website. Cookies and beacons are not a threat to your computer as such in the way that a virus is but many people block them on their computer because they don’t like the idea that information is also being collected about their surfing habits and being sent back to the websites that they visit.
Flash cookies
These are also known at "locally shared objects" and store information related to Adobe Flash, such as video volume preferences. The problem with Flash cookies is that they can't be removed or blocked in the same way as cookies. Some comapnies have used this to add a cookie to a Flash cookie, so if the cookie is deleted, it gets reloaded again by the Flash cookie.
Companies who harvest and analyse data
Hundreds of companies now exist simply to harvest your personal data and your surfing habits. They argue that all the data is anonymous because they allocate each person they track a long, random number but many people do not believe that, or believe that the system could be abused and don't like the idea anyway that they are doing this without express permission. These companies collect data, then use sophisticated statistical analysis and psychological models to predict your future buying and surfing habits. It can then sell on this information to advertisers, who will pay a premium for having their adverts directed at people with a confirmed interest in their products.
Dictionary.com was shown in 2010 to have installed over 200 pieces of tracking software when their web site was visited by a user. Some were installed by Dictionary.com but many others were installed by companies who lurked in the background. There are many others, including Facebook, Quantcast, Com Score, Twitter, Yahoo, AppNexus and more. Click on this link to see which companies are doing the most tracking:
A case study - BlueKai
BlueKai is a huge player in the data harvesting and analysing market in America. They have customers such as Expedia (a massive travel company, who want to advertise to individuals) and are thought to track 80% of the US online population and have harvested 200 million profiles of individuals' buying and surfing habits.
Suppose you live in San Francisco and want to fly to Hawaii first class. You visit a travel site for flights that works with BlueKai. When you search for a first class flight between San Francisco and Hawaii, leaving in the next 7 days and returning 2 weeks later, a cookie that BlueKai put on your computer tracks this event and passes it back to BlueKai. BlueKai analyses this using sophisticated software and profiling to add you to a category of people, perhaps called “Big Spending West Coast USA Last Minute Flyers”. BlueKai now invites businesses selling flights to Hawaii, rental cars in Hawaii, luxury hotels, souvenir shops and so on to bid in an auction for each potential anonymous customer in the “Big Spending West Coast USA Last Minute Flyers” group, with each potential customer being sold for 1 or 2 cents in the dollar.
Whoever wins, for example, the Hilton in Hawaii hotel, then has to go to an advertising exchange such as Google's DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Hilton has to enter a second auction with other would-be advertisers for the right to send an advert to one of the people in the “Big Spending West Coast USA Last Minute Flyers” group, which it won in the previous auction. If the Hilton hotel in Hawaii wins that auction, which is held in real time, an advert will show up immediately someone in the “Big Spending West Coast USA Last Minute Flyers” visits a website and is detected by Google's DoubleClick company.
Although each potential profile might be auctioned off for just 1 or 2 cents, with tens of millions of profiles being auctioned each day, you can do a quick calculation in your head to see how much a company might make by tracking data, and why it is one of the biggest growth areas on the Internet!
Protecting yourself
There are a number of things you can do to try and prevent tracking.
1) You should start by downloading a free piece of software to get rid of any tracking software on your computer. A good one is called CCleaner, which you can get from here:
https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner
2) Once you have cleaned up your hard drive, you should adjust the settings on all the web browsers on your computer to block cookies. For Internet Explorer, click on the gear in the top-right corner and select Internet Options. Go to the Privacy tab and click the Advanced button. Check the "Override automatic cookie handling" option, and then set "Third-party Cookies" to "Block." Click the OK button. In Google Chrome, click the three-lined icon in the top-right corner of your screen and select Settings. Under the Settings section, click the "Show advanced settings" link at the bottom. In the Privacy section, click on the Content Settings button. Under Cookies, check the "Block third-party cookies and site data" option and click Done. For Firefox, click the three-lined icon in the top-right corner of your screen and select Options (PC) or Preferences (Mac). Go to the Privacy tab and under History, set "Firefox will" to "Use custom settings for history." Then set "Accept third-party cookies" to "Never." Safari users should pull down the Safari menu and select the Privacy tab. Choose the option to block cookies from third parties and advertisers.
3) Next, you can opt out of receiving cookies from registered advertisers. You can do this here: http://www.networkadvertising.org/choices/ It won't stop everyone but it will stop the big companies, who are regulated.
4) Next, you could hide you Internet presence using a Virtual Private Network (VPN). There are many companies that provide this service. Some are free but most are paid-for services. They will ensure you IP address is hidden and all communications is encrypted.
5) Finally, you should run tracker cleaning apps like CCleaner regularly, just in case!