k027
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 Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 3:20 pm Post subject: How Do They Track You? Let Us Count the Ways |
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| Quote: | The comScore study tallied five types of “data collection events” on the Internet for 15 large media companies. Four of these events are actions that occur on the sites the media companies run: Pages displayed, search queries entered, videos played, and advertising displayed. Each time one of those four things occurs, there is a conversation between the user’s computer and the server of the company that owns the site or serves the ad.
The fifth area that comScore looked at was ads served on pages anywhere on the Web by advertising networks owned by the media companies. These include text ads provided by Google’s AdSense network, for example, and display ads from AOL’s Advertising.com unit. Ad networks add the ability for these companies to note where you are on other Web sites when they serve you an ad. Google, for example, can note that your Internet Protocol address is on Kelly Blue Book, if it serves you an AdSense ad there.
So each time one of these five things occur, it is an “data collection event.” The data that is transferred varies for each. Typically, Web company receives information about the type of page the user is looking at, the user’s I.P. address (which sometimes has clues to the user’s location), and for advertising, the content of the ad. Most Web sites and advertising networks place cookies on users’ browsers, allowing them to recognize each time they interact with that user in the future. Cookies themselves don’t identify the name of users, but if users register with a Web site, their identities can be linked to their cookies.
When all these data collection events are combined for users in the United States in December 2007, Yahoo had the potential to gather data, through 400 billion events in the month. Time Warner, which includes AOL, was second, with about 100 billion events. Google was not too far behind with 91 billion.
Interestingly, Microsoft, with 51 billion events in December is far behind not only the other big Internet companies, but also the News Corporation’s Fox Interactive Media, which owns MySpace. |
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/how-do-they-track-you-let-us-count-the-ways/index.htm
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