Most of us don’t really like the idea that we are somehow being ‘spied upon’ while we are using the Internet. There is something vaguely sinister in the notion that what we are doing and where we are going is being monitored and what we see is being ‘adjusted’ to take into account our behaviours and preferences.
However sinister we may find it though it’s happening all the time and will continue to do so unless you take steps to stop it.
The Origin
To begin with, we need to be clear that there is nothing new in this. For example, long before the advent of the Internet, the major supermarket chains were taking hours and hours of videotape watching exactly how customers in their stores were behaving. That included things such as which direction people turned when first entering into the supermarket, what aisles they looked at first, whether they appeared to be looking at shelves higher or lower up and the exact nature of the products they were buying.
All of the input was then carefully statistically analysed by psychologists to produce data that supermarkets tried to exploit in order to increase their sales.
For example, the result of that is why you will typically see the more expensive branded products placed at face height on shelves while the cheaper brands are often on the bottom shelves where significant numbers of people never bother to look.
The Internet builds on this foundation
Just as the supermarkets love to see which shelves are visited in which sequence by different types of shopper, such as male versus female or younger versus older, the Internet does the same.
Now you may be thinking that the Internet is an entirely anonymous place where your behaviours can never be tracked and monitored in this fashion. Yet if you think about it, deriving extremely useful marketing information from shoppers in a supermarket did not necessitate knowing exactly who they were.
In the same fashion, many individual websites and software products will do what they can to try and track your behaviors online.
If you’d like to know more about such retention of privacy techniques, you should speak to a well-qualified computer support technician.
Good luck and remember that, at least to some extent, Big Brother is Watching You!
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