Web tracking

Web tracking is the practice by which operators of websites collect and share information about a particular user's activity on the World Wide Web. Analysis of an individual user's behaviour may be used to provide content that relates to their implied preferences.

How does it work?

Whenever you use the Internet, you leave a record of the websites you visit, along with each and every thing you click. To track this information, many websites save a small piece of data, embed invisible objects, or use your user accounts and hardware configuration.

Methods

• Click-through rate
• Mouse tracking
• Fingerprint (computing)
• Browser cookies, Evercookies
• Session replay scripts
• Web beacons
• Website caches

Tracking tools with Industry

1. Google analytics in E-commerce
2. YouTube Tracking in Entertainment
3. WordPress Tracking in Blogs

Controversy

Use of web tracking can be controversial when applied in the context of a private individual; and to varying degrees is subject to legislation such as the EU's eCommerce Directive and the UK's Data Protection Act. When it is done without the knowledge of a user, it may be considered a breach of browser security.

Justification

In a business-to-business context, understanding a visitor's behaviour in order to identify buying intentions is seen by many commercial organisations as an effective way to target marketing activities. Visiting companies can be approached, both on- and offline, with marketing and sales propositions which are relevant to their current requirements. From the point of view of a sales organisation, engaging with a potential customer when they are actively looking to buy can produce savings in otherwise wasted marketing funds.

Prevention

Contrary to popular belief, browser privacy mode does not prevent (all) tracking attempts because it usually only blocks the storage of information on the visitor site (cookies). It does not help, however, against live data transmissions like the various fingerprinting methods. Such fingerprints can be easily de-anonymized.

See also

• Activity tracker
• Big data
• Consumer Data Industry Association
• Data collection
• Information privacy
• Internet tracking
• Employee monitoring
• GPS tracking
• Internet privacy
• Network surveillance
• Track and trace
• Web analytics
• Web beacon

External links

• "Princeton Web Transparency & Accountability Project (WebTap)". Retrieved 2018-02-20. We monitor websites and services to find out what user data companies collect, how they collect it, and what they do with it. With our measurement platform, we study privacy, security, and ethics of consumer data usage
  • "OpenWPM – A privacy measurement framework". Retrieved 2018-02-20.