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Personal Information On The Internet

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One would think that he or she could get on the internet and be fully protected. Personal information is being taken every time internet explorer is opened. The people that record the information are not hackers or government agents. The people recording the information are ad agencies. When shopping online for a certain object that object starts popping up on every page visited in the form of a banner ad or side ad. When shopping online, ad agencies constantly track behavior and gather information such as age, gender, and ethnicity. Once the ad agencies collect this information, they go to major retailers normally visited according to online shopping habits, and sell that information to them. The retailers use the information to create …show more content…

These agencies use various tools to collect the data and they then sell it to the advertisers. The advertiser then constructs an ad to appeal to the customer. The customer sees the ad, and if the system works, then the product will be something new that the customer does not own, and a product that the customer is interested in. The customer will then see the ad and purchase the product.
Behavioral advertising is a broad set of activities companies engage in to collect data about shopping activity. Companies use a variety of tools to collect information about shopping behavior. For online behavior tracking they typically use cookies which are small files stored on the computer when a new website has been visited. In stores, the most common way of behavior tracking is using the connection of a phone on the store’s free Wi-Fi to track where and how long a person is in a certain spot of the store. Companies use this data to help determine interests based on the pages visited, the content click on, and where one shops in a store. All this data creates a user profile that can be used to segment the population into certain groups. People with similar shopping behaviors can be grouped together in one segment. Then, the segments are shown ads that cater to their interests. As technology has evolved so has marketing. The number of tools a company can use to track online behavior is endless. One of them being Flash, it allows advertisers to place Flash cookies known

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