How do websites collect data from their users?

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How do websites collect data from their users?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Either you give it to them, or you gave it to someone else, who gives it to them.

Your browser gives them some information about the browser and operating system. Your operating system or home router send your IP address, which can be correlated with geographic information.

Most websites ask for an email address. Some ask for your name and credit card number. The real value is often in the platform-specific things. Shopping websites keep track of all the things you bought or clicked on, along with associated things like the price of things you didn’t buy, how long you looked at them, etc. Every interaction on the website page, like typing, moving a mouse, clicking, and scrolling, can potentially be registered by your browser and sent to the website. Social media websites will often ask for more personal information, will host your photographs and written content, and will allow you to add contacts. All of this information, and the patterns by which you produce and consume it, go into the data pipeline.

Companies will also sometimes share this data using a variety of mechanisms. It used to be fashionable to simply buy and sell it, but that’s become less popular recently since people caught on to it. Nowadays, many companies will share data with the big collectors (Google, Twitter, Facebook) by allowing them to embed little web elements into other websites. Then they use all the normal tracking mechanisms to collect data about your actions on this other website. In return, Google/FB/Twitter provide tools for other companies to describe how they want advertisements to be targeted, and then the ad companies will perform the targeting on the other companies’ behalf.

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