As more and more people are going online to bank, shop and
play, it is becoming more popular for companies to take note and track when and
where consumers are logging in. This has
led to growing concerns about personal privacy online. Often third parties track
personal data in order to gather a consumer’s shopping trends vary service and
target advertising space on the web.
To demonstrate this tracking, I downloaded the lightbeam
add-on for Firefox. I went online for twenty minutes to a few of my regular Internet
haunts. The results were quite shocking. Regular social media sites like
YouTube and Facebook had expected connections, maybe one or two, whereas my
regular funny-content site, Izismile, connected with more than 100 3rd
party sites. This made me much more wary about where I go online. These sites
form a group of third party websites who track my Internet use and gather
consumer data.
I had always noticed that my Internet banner ads reflected
recent browsing but had not realized the extent to which this was happening. If
20 minutes of browsing 11 sites had this large of an impact, I cannot begin to
imagine how many connections would be formed with hours of web browsing.
From now, I will continue using the add-on to figure out if
I should continue visiting some of my favorite websites. I thought that I was
careful with my online identity, but my eyes really have been opened to how
easy it is to be tracked.
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