What is third party advertising?
How does it work? Let’s start with us as users. That website you like to visit has content to present to you. However, this content needs financial support. Most of the websites offer advertisements to their visitors. Some of these advertisements come from different sources outside of the website.
In other words, third-party servers are remote storage. The tracking system is actually a strategy. With a small cookie, a business can find out people’s preferences, the articles they are interested in, and the topics they like to follow.
Therefore, the web browser plays the role of host. The website forces the Browser to accept the cookie to display the content. The website server gives the browser a unique cookie. The cookie contains all the information necessary to be used in subsequent statistics.
When you see something familiar that you might have searched for or clicked on, it’s actually the third party serving you the most ads similar to the old one, all based on your behavior. Your behavior is tracked through the cookie placed within the files of your web browser. The cookie communicates with the home server.
have a cookie
Cookies are small files, with strings of different numbers and letters. Each website is connected to a server. The server can be perceived as a hard drive on which all the folders and files are stored. The cookie, therefore, is a folder. Despite its small size, it is designed to transfer effortlessly from server to web browser. Otherwise, the user might just decide to leave.
The cookie stores various information that will give the company a unique insight. By the time the cookie leaves the home server, your data contains:
– Cookie value
– Name of the cookie
– Date of Expiry
– The path of the cookie.
According to your information, it can only be accessed from your home server and will return when it expires.
Meanwhile, the cookie will collect data about the behavior of the host. Every website the user visited, the links, the photos the user clicked on. Depending on user behavior and habits, the average cookie may contain:
– Operating system installed on the host computer
– Processor type
– Internet browser model and version
– List of plugins/plugins/extensions
– Do not track status
– Behavior on a publisher’s site
– Keywords entered
-Screen resolution
– Fonts and font size
– Geographic location
-Language
– Time zone
– IP adress
– referrer url
– requested URL
– Credit card information entered when visiting the website.
Companies are legally required to make the cookie expire after a certain period of time. The data that the cookie collects and transfers to the home server is stored for 24 months in most cases. Some companies retain information for much longer. Data accumulates for a long time, and it is quite possible that some of your information from a while ago still exists on the Internet. In addition, criminals in the dark web black markets seek data. And that’s why most cybersecurity companies use the term “Internet never forgets.”
Who else follows me online?
Each user is different with unique interests and habits. Every website you visit has one or two trackers running in the background. Not everyone is placing cookies on your web browser, but they are still monitoring your ad performance nonetheless.
If you take a look at the Privacy Policy of various companies, you may notice quite long text in each of them. Most users never read what is disclosed. The Privacy Policy among the data acquired adds the list of partners, as well as other data.
It may not be the website you visit, but the third-party companies they have partnered with. The data collected by the website you visited is shared later. These may include: third-party partners, such as marketers, integration partners, pixel partners, and resellers.
Despite the general belief that only advertising companies are the online trackers, there are few other online entities that perform the same task.
Data brokers and data miners
Data brokers trade data instead of stocks and bonds. Data brokers are people much like private detectives. These people collect the data both online and offline.
What exactly are they collecting? Data brokers often refer to themselves as database marketers or consumer data analytics companies. They collect information about an individual as a consumer.
The online meeting looks for any clues or information that could identify the person, as well as describe their interests or hobbies. The more unique and detailed the report, the more it costs.
Offline data is something that is not easily acquired. These include police reports or any legal information. Most data brokers will pay someone to acquire that information for them.
Curious users bought their own data. The results received show that they sell the data on the average person for about $50. This generally depends on the amount of information. Some have confirmed that everything is there in detail, and some that the information is distorted.
What’s in the reports?
-Name
– Address
-Gender
– Email address
– Social media accounts
– Preferences
– Hobbies
– Recent searches or likes
– Credit scores
– Property records
– Short records
– Driver’s license and motor vehicle records
– Census data
– Birth certificates
– Marriage licenses
– Divorce Records
– State records of professional and recreational licenses.
– Vote registration information
– Bankruptcy records
As with large companies, even data brokers merge their collected information with others. They have an opt-out service. Deleting data from your website permanently costs $129 a year.
Data mining companies are very similar. Companies collect vast amounts of data and analyze the raw material. Data mining is the analytical process of discovering patterns in large data sets involving machine learning methods, statistics, and database systems.
Some of these companies include:
-Anaconda
-IBM
– Oracle data mining
– Portrait Software
– Quantum Leap Innovations
– Terradata.
people search websites
If you’ve been searching for a long-lost relative, ancestor, or school friend, chances are your details are still on the internet. Most of the people who browse websites store all the data. Everything you have submitted is stored on their servers.
Some of these websites also have an opt-out service:
– Anyone that
– Has been verified
– Classmates
– people finder
-pipl
-Spokeo
– White pages.
Accessories
Internet browser plugins or extensions can be extremely useful. However, recent research has shown that popular VPN plugins lately are tracking every movement of users. The paradox of the plugin that is supposed to mainly hide the IP address of the users, while tracking them.
Others, on the other hand, are vulnerable to DNS attack. Which means someone could be looking at your URL bar. If you visited a website it doesn’t mean they don’t know you. What you don’t know is that the website you visited could see your IP address. In other words, it’s very similar to telling someone your name and address.
Major tracking companies
The best known trackers today are:
-add this
-Adnxs
– Double click
– Investigation of scorecard
Data tracking companies mostly organize data into categories. This makes it much easier to back out of the system when necessary. For example, marketing companies are running an ad for a retail company and are looking for a certain group of consumers. The system will point to a specific description.
Consumer categorization is nothing new. Simply using privacy software like Identity Theft Preventer can point out how much we, as users, make readily available on our computers and web browsers, without even being aware of it.
The reason companies and cybercriminals collect so much data is the cookie left in the browser. It has been proven that only 25% of internet users clean the web browser regularly. Which makes the rest of them easy to attack. “The Internet never forgets”, so how much exactly accumulates in us over time?