The Murky World of Third Party Web Tracking

One of the murkiest areas of Internet commerce is the international trade of personal information gathered by certain companies who monitor our behavior online. This kind of third-party data gathering is ubiquitous on the web thanks to the humble “cookie”.

A cookie is a small piece of data that a website loads onto your browser. Every time you visit that site in future, the browser sends that cookie back to the server so that the website can correlate this with your previous activity.

Cookies are an essential part of Internet commerce and also used in analytics. They are safe in the sense that they cannot carry viruses. But where safety is less clear is that they make it possible to build up a picture of your online activity, particularly when a website contains trackers belonging to a third party, such as an advertiser or analytics provider. These third party trackers are often able to piece together your activity on several different websites and when that happens the question of privacy becomes more acute.

That raises some important questions. How do these companies use the data they acquire, where is it stored and who has access to it? The law covering this kind of activity is a particularly murky shade of grey in many parts of the world so the answers are not at all clear.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/530741/the-murky-world-of-third-party-web-tracking/

http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.1066