Have you ever noticed that when you are browsing websites online, the advertisements that pop up on the pages seem to match other things you have searched? For example, I may have been shopping for shoes online at DSW, and then later on when I’m scrolling through my Facebook feed, I see an advertisement featuring all of the shoes I had clicked on, even if I had searched the shoes on my laptop and was using Facebook on my iPhone. It’s almost as if advertisers are spying on us… which in a sense, they are.
“What this technology is really good at doing is following you from site to site, tracking your actions, and compiling them into a database, usually not by real name, but by a pseudonymous numerical identifier,” says Narayanan. Through the use of cookies and canvas fingerprinting, companies are able to essentially stalk us while on the internet. Cookie Syncing is a process where cookies are able to track you online and create a profile about you based on what you search, and they are able to share this information with the entities who are tracking you to join the IDs they gathered and discover which device you are on. They can use this to continue to build a more detailed profile of you as cookies come back again and again. Canvas Fingerprinting is a technique where a fingerprint is created for each device by assigning a number, since each device has a code that interacts in a slightly different way. This fingerprint can be used by third-parties to determine which user uses which device.
These technologies are extremely useful for marketers to help show advertisements that appeal to the user, but people are becoming concerned with how much information can be collected about us online without our knowledge, and how little transparency is used. Although companies say they are not using our real names, the data they collect is pseudonymous rather than anonymous, and therefore they could reveal our full name and identity if they wanted. So when does this technology cross the line of being harmless to being harmful? Should we be more concerned about our privacy online?
Article: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-do-advertisers-track-you-online-we-found-out/