You are shopping through internet for some product. After sometime you browse for that product in some websites, open your favorite news website and browsing in it. In that website you may find similar product that you searched a few minutes before. After that you open your favorite and famous website, there also you find same ad. It’s funny, just you have experience the custom Internet advertising. Companies use the user’s browsing habits and some other data for promotions to make more personalized. So personal information need to gather by the companies.
Following are some of the way that companies collect personal information from users.
- Cookies: Cookie is a tiny text file which contains data of websites that you visited. In custom advertising this data is called as clickstream. The cookies are two types, first party cookies and third party cookies. The first party cookies are sent by the website which displays in the address bar. The third party cookies comes from other domains, such as images and ads displayed on the web page. These third party cookies are used by the marketing companies to advertise on the websites. Marketing companies use them to compile surprisingly users browsing habits complete records. This information helps them to deliver the custom ads to users.
- Accounts or profiles created in the websites: When you create a user or account or profile on some community or social media websites, you probably enter your personal information about interests and favorite books, music, movies, political views, education, religion, age to know better about you by your friends or others. These websites use that data to provide you custom ads.
- Internet search data: As per an Internet survey conducted by the Pew in 2011 found that 92 percent of adults used search engines. So it is not a wonder that search engine sites like MSN, Yahoo! And Google are into advertising business. They analyze user habits and search terms to place the custom ads.
- Purchase history: You may see the websites like Amazon suggest some products that reminds your purchase or viewed for similar product in the past from them. Because online stores use user registration or cookies to track what the user buy. They even consider what you what you put in your cart and later abandon them. They use this data to show the customized ads for the users or visitors of such websites.
The Internet users understand the tactics of marketing companies. They collect millions of Internet users’ data across the world and use it to place the ads. There are negative opinions about the personal data collection from cookies of the user, and chances of virus attacks to the user’s computers. Even though most of the companies are successfully providing customized advertisements without any issues.