Online advertising has never been more invasive or more unescapable. A single site may contain thousands of data trackers, building a detailed profile on who you are and what you do online. There are various types of trackers that advertisements use to collect your personal data.
The most common tool to collect user data are cookies. Cookies are tiny files placed on your computer by your browser when you visit a particular website. There are 2 types of cookies: session cookies and persistent cookies.
- Session cookies are cookies that enable us to move from one part of the website to another without having to login again for every webpage of the website. Session cookies only store data as long as your current session on a particular website.
- Persistent cookies are placed in your computer and stay in your computer. They are used primarily by marketing firms to track your browsing history. They do this so they can analyze your search history and advertise appropriate products and services.
- Advertisements can also use JavaScript code to collect user data through the process of Browser Fingerprinting. The data collected can be as personal as the user's time zone and what browser extensions the user has installed.
Now that you know how advertisements can collect a user's personal data, you might be wondering what type of information companies are interested in collected, storing, and analyzing. Advertisements can collect the following data:
- The user's gender
- The user's age
- The user's address
- The user's current location
- What type of music the user listens to
- What type of movies and TV shows interest the user
- What websites the user uses to purchase goods and services online
- The user's purchasing power
Individual profiles created from all this data allows precise conclusions about personal situations to be drawn. These user data profiles are sold to banks, insurers, and advertisers so they can capitalize from them.
To prevent companies from taking your personal data you can clean browsing history and cookies after using the internet, and pay attention to permission requests to make sure a website/application is not asking for excessive information.
