When a user clicks on a website,
a “session” begins. A session tracks you from the first page you click on until
you exit the site. Your session can be monitored in several ways. Your IP
address, the binary digits assigned to your computer by your Internet provider,
can provide website owners with your approximate location, including city,
suburb and state, as well as your computer hardware and what type of operating
system you run.
Although IP addresses can
provide a fairly detailed summary of your computer, Web browser cookies provide
a more complete profile of a user’s preferences. Three types of cookies are sent out when you surf the
Internet.
Not all Internet cookies are created equally.
The last type of cookie is a third-party ad-serving cookie, which monitors your Web browsing to show you advertisements that relate to your interests.
The site owner places third-party ads on the site, but the actual ads are hosted by another site. If your computer accepts the third-party cookie, the company hosting the ad can access your information and compile detail-rich profiles, including your IP address, location,
shopping preferences and in some cases the means and methods in which you pay online.
In order to maintain your privacy, your Internet browser will allow you to decline all third-party cookies. Although you may actively be diverting third-party cookies, they can also appear in the form of Web bugs. Web bugs are small graphics imbedded into a webpage. Web bugs are used to hide the fact that the page is being monitored. Information collected by Web bugs include IP addresses, times that the image was viewed and data from related cookies on your computer. Web bugs can track you as you move from site to site and create personal profiles of users.
You can check and see if Web bugs are planted within a page by viewing the page source. If you see images called “clear.gif” or find images linking to another site, you’ll have found Web bugs. This is one way how companies collect your private information.
CareerBuilder included JavaScript code from 10 (!) different tracking domains: RubiconProject, AdSonar, Advertising.com, Tacoda.net (all three are divisions of AOL advertising), Quantcast, Pulse 360, Undertone, AdBureau (part of Microsoft Advertising), Traffic Marketplace, and DoubleClick (which is owned by Google). Each of these tracking companies can track you over multiple different websites, effectively following you as you browse the web. They use either cookies, or hard-to-delete "super cookies", or other means, to link their records of each new page they see you visit to their records of all the pages you've visited in the previous minutes, months and years. The widespread presence of 3rd party web bugs and tracking scripts on a large proportion of the sites on the Web means that these companies can build up a long term profile of most of the things we do with our web browsers.
A session
cookie is a simple text file that expires once you close the
website.
A persistent
cookie exists as a text file as well, but it remains on your hard
drive and either expires at a set time or remains until you delete it. Often
used when someone logs in to a site and wants to remain logged in for a set
amount of time, persistent or permanent cookies collect information about you
and your Web browsing habits.
The important thing to note is
that these types of cookies generally exist for only one domain.Not all Internet cookies are created equally.
The last type of cookie is a third-party ad-serving cookie, which monitors your Web browsing to show you advertisements that relate to your interests.
The site owner places third-party ads on the site, but the actual ads are hosted by another site. If your computer accepts the third-party cookie, the company hosting the ad can access your information and compile detail-rich profiles, including your IP address, location,
shopping preferences and in some cases the means and methods in which you pay online.
In order to maintain your privacy, your Internet browser will allow you to decline all third-party cookies. Although you may actively be diverting third-party cookies, they can also appear in the form of Web bugs. Web bugs are small graphics imbedded into a webpage. Web bugs are used to hide the fact that the page is being monitored. Information collected by Web bugs include IP addresses, times that the image was viewed and data from related cookies on your computer. Web bugs can track you as you move from site to site and create personal profiles of users.
You can check and see if Web bugs are planted within a page by viewing the page source. If you see images called “clear.gif” or find images linking to another site, you’ll have found Web bugs. This is one way how companies collect your private information.
CareerBuilder included JavaScript code from 10 (!) different tracking domains: RubiconProject, AdSonar, Advertising.com, Tacoda.net (all three are divisions of AOL advertising), Quantcast, Pulse 360, Undertone, AdBureau (part of Microsoft Advertising), Traffic Marketplace, and DoubleClick (which is owned by Google). Each of these tracking companies can track you over multiple different websites, effectively following you as you browse the web. They use either cookies, or hard-to-delete "super cookies", or other means, to link their records of each new page they see you visit to their records of all the pages you've visited in the previous minutes, months and years. The widespread presence of 3rd party web bugs and tracking scripts on a large proportion of the sites on the Web means that these companies can build up a long term profile of most of the things we do with our web browsers.
Is there a way that we can avoid this from happening. And how can you differentiate a virus from an ad that has gotten your information and keeps coming up every time you log into certain websites. Is there something we can do in order to prevent this from happening because I think that even by just clicking on the "x" to close the window sometimes that is just enough to give access to certain ads.
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