Do you follow me online?

Right people at the right time:

This is the most common sales slogan for advertising companies. This is commonly known as targeted advertising. Advertisers can choose the demographics of advertisers to whom they want to sell their products. Even beyond apps like Facebook, where people willingly share information like relationship status and likes, there are other companies that collect similar data based on users’ online activities.

Through the hundreds of web pages you visit every day, you are leaving a trail of information that advertising companies can track. All these websites can provide all the free services they offer, just because they can offset the costs through advertising. So the success of websites comes from generating traffic through their websites. Advertisers’ success comes from providing the most relevant ads to each user so that they end up clicking on the ads and possibly paying money for the products or services they are selling. The data that advertising agencies track is not something you can delete by closing your browser or even restarting your machine.

Web cookies:

According to wikipedia: A cookie is used for an originating website to send state information to a user’s browser and for the browser to return the state information to the originating site. Status information can be anything that is actually stored on your computer. So should you permanently disable cookies? In general, it is good to allow cookies on your computer to enjoy all the benefits of a website. For example, when you’re shopping at Amazon.com and you’ve added some items to your shopping cart, you need to have cookies enabled so you can come back the next day and continue shopping from where you left off. So it’s a very good thing in terms of convenience.

Advertising companies use the same technique to store cookies on your computer and track your online activities. This page (http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp) lists the cookies of the advertising platforms that are currently running on your computer. If you look closely, it will be the ads placed by one of these companies that will be the most relevant to your recent online activity.

How to protect myself:

Although most advertising companies are not malicious and don’t make a profit selling your personal information, it’s good to be aware of what’s going on so close to you. There is some information that you never want to share with anyone, like perhaps your medical situation. For such information, you should know how to protect yourself from inadvertently disclosing it to online businesses. Here are some tips:

• Clear your cookies from time to time. There is plenty of help online on how to do it.
• Beware of malicious sites. Remember that they can also place cookies on your computer.
• When entering secure data such as bank details or passwords, make sure that the page is encrypted by HTTPS. You will also get a lot of help if you search online on this topic.
• From time to time, look at the cookies on your computer to make sure someone else using that computer isn’t going to malicious sites.

There are online safety organizations and security enthusiasts who check advertising companies if they try to cross the line. Some of these organizations are good to know:

• EPIC.org
• networkadvertising.org
• worldprivacyforum.org

Online medical information:

Special care should be taken when searching for medical answers online. Search engines usually store the IP addresses of their users so that they can trace a particular search query back to an individual quite easily. When conducting medical searches, try to use websites that do not store any information that could be used to identify you. Try to find services that do not store any information that is used to trace a search query back to you to protect the privacy of your medical information.

Conclusion:

Prevention is better than cure. The Internet continues to evolve and we do not know what it will be like tomorrow. It is better to protect any sensitive data and still enjoy all the benefits of the Internet.