Internet Tracking

Internet tracking or Web tracking is the practice by which operators of websites and third parties collect, store and share information about visitors’ activities on the World Wide Web.

The purpose of internet tracking is to deliver a more personalized browsing experience.

Internet tracking involves collecting information about your use of or interaction with a particular web page. Web trackers can collect more information than just your browsing of a website. Websites also use them to collect your personal information: your IP address, where you came from, your geographic location and your browser characteristics.

The uses of web tracking include the following:

• Advertising companies actively collect information about users and make profiles that are used to individualize advertisements. User activities include websites visited, watched videos, interactions on social networks, and online transactions.
• Law enforcement agencies may use web tracking to spy on individuals and solve crimes.
• Web analytics focuses more on the performance of a website as a whole. Web tracking will give insight on how a website is being used and see how long a user spends on a certain page. This can be used to see who may have the most interest in the content of the website.

Three main methods used to track are: cookies, fingerprinting, and beacons. Websites may identify you with your login credentials, unique device identifiers or your IP address. Once a site determines your identity, it then assembles all the information it collects about you in a data profile.

Cookies are small files stored in your browser that help websites you visit often identify you. Websites use cookies to store your custom settings and preferences or log-in information. Cookies can add convenience to the sites you visit often, but unfortunately websites also use them to store your data.

Tracking beacons are small, transparent “images” often 1 pixel by 1 pixel, that load on on web pages (or within emails) for tracking and reporting purposes. Websites use beacons to get information about how many times visitors load certain pages. Advertisers also use these tracking beacons to determine how many impressions their ads get.

Fingerprinting is a more complex tracking method. Rather than storing a file in your browser or on your computer to identify you, it’s done by checking your browser configurations and settings. The methods of fingerprinting are always growing more complex. Other factors that are used to identify you could be your browser version, monitor size and resolution, or operating system.

Other methods for internet tracking are:

·         Canvas fingerprinting allows websites to identify and track users using HTML5 canvas elements instead of using a browser cookie.

·         Cross-device tracking are used by advertisers to help identify which channels are most successful in helping convert browsers into buyers.

·         Click-through rate is used by advertisers to measure the number of clicks they receive on their ads per number of impressions.

·         Mouse tracking collects the user’s mouse cursor positions on the computer.

·         Browser fingerprinting relies on your browser and is a way of identifying users every time they go online and track your activity. Through fingerprinting, websites can determine the users operating system, language, time zone, and browser version without your permission.

·         Supercookies or "evercookies" can not only be used to track users across the web, but they are also hard to detect and difficult to remove since they are stored in a different place than the standard cookies.

·         Session replay scripts allow the ability to replay a visitor's journey on a web site or within a mobile application or web application.

·         Web beacons are commonly used to check whether or not an individual who received an email actually read it.

·         Favicons can be used to track users since they persist across browsing sessions