Tracked and Profiled

It seems everyone these days is spying on us when we are online. Of course there is the NSA recent metadata collection project that was recently leaked. Then there is the marketing companies. At first they just kept note of your search history and your browsing history. This way they could put up adds that you are more likely to be interested in. Now they want to go one step further. These marketing companies want to include your username and picture when they are showing adds. However they do not want to do that for the ads targeted to you. No they want to do that for ads targeted towards others. We are now being used as marketing assistance. However, we get nothing out of this. We get no compensation for our user name or picture being used, in some cases without our consent. And there does not seem to be any way to opt out of this new way of marketing. Even now when you “opt out” of being tracked by an information gathering companies. This information is used by companies such as Spokeo, PeopleFinder, Intelius, etc. who get people to pay for the ability to find someone. However the information they show their subscribers contains you full name, email address, home address, phone number, annual income, relatives names, etc. And even if you tell them you do not want to be tracked, they still track you.

It seems that nothing about ourselves is private anymore. If you do anything online these sharing companies will know about it and then they are paid to inform others. While there is some ways of evading and mitigating what these data gathering companies know, and thus all companies that pay them, it requires more work on our halves. The web search engine DuckDuckGo is an alternative to Google which does not track your search history. Something small like this can help protect what little online privacy you might have left.

Another thing users can do is ensure the “Do not track” flag is set in their browser. However due to the way the advertising companies interpret the “Do not track” flag this doesn’t do much. The ordinary user would take this to mean they are expressing that they do not want any of the sites they visit to track and store information about them. But that is not the way the two big advertising companies, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Digital Advertising Alliance, interpret that flag. Their interpretation is that you do not want to see targeted ads. However they still feel that they have the ability to track and store information about the sites you visited.