What is third party advertising?

How does it work? Let’s start with us as users. That website you like to visit has content to present to you. However, this content needs financial support. Most of the websites offer advertisements to their visitors. Some of these advertisements come from different sources outside of the website.

In other words, third-party servers are remote storages. The tracking system is actually a strategy. With a small cookie, a company can find out people’s preferences, the items they are interested in, and the topics they like to follow.

Therefore, the web browser plays the role of host. The website forces the browser to accept the cookie to display the content. The website server gives the browser a unique cookie. The cookie contains all the information necessary to use it in subsequent statistics.

When you see something familiar that you might have searched or clicked on, it is actually the third party that is showing you the most ads similar to the ones above, and all based on your behavior. Your behavior is tracked through the cookie placed within the files of your web browser. The cookie communicates with the home server.

Have a cookie

Cookies are small files, with a string of different numbers and letters. Each website is connected to a server. The server can be seen as a hard drive on which all the folders and files are stored. The cookie, therefore, is a folder. Despite its small size, it is designed to effortlessly transfer from server to web browser. Otherwise, the user may decide to leave.

The cookie stores various information that will give the company a unique perspective. At the moment the cookie leaves the home server, its data contains:

– Cookie value

– Name of the cookie

– Date of Expiry

– The path of the cookie.

Based on your information, it can only be accessed from your home server and will return when it expires.

Meanwhile, the cookie will collect data on the behavior of the host. Every website the user visited, the links, the photos they clicked on. Depending on the behavior and habits of the user, the average cookie may contain:

– Operating system installed on the host computer

– Processor type

– Internet browser model and version

– List of plugins / plugins / extensions

– Do not track status

– Behavior on a publisher site

– Keywords entered

– Screen resolution

– Fonts and font size

– Geographic location

– Idiom

– Time zone

– IP adress

– referrer URL

– requested url

– Credit card information entered when visiting the website.

Companies are legally obliged to make the cookie expire after a certain period of time. The data that the cookie collects and transfers to the home server is stored for 24 months in most cases. Some companies keep the information for much longer. Data accumulates for a long time, and it is very possible that some information about you from a long time ago still exists on the Internet. In addition, criminals on the dark web black market are looking for data. And that’s why most cybersecurity companies use the term “the internet never forgets.”

Who else is tracking me online?

Each user is different with unique interests and habits. Every website you visit has a crawler or two in the background. Not everyone sets cookies on your web browser, but they still monitor your ad performance nonetheless.

If you take a look at the Privacy Policy of several companies, you can see quite a long text in each of them. Most users never read what is disclosed. The Privacy Policy between the acquired data adds the list of partners as well as other facts.

It may not be the website you visit, but the third-party companies with which they have partnered. The data collected by the website you visited is shared later. These may include: third-party partners, such as marketers, integration partners, pixel partners, and resellers.

Despite the widespread belief that only advertising companies are the online trackers, there are few other online entities that perform the same task.

Data brokers and data miners

Data Brokers trade data instead of stocks and bonds. Data brokers are individuals very much like private detectives. These people collect the data online and offline.

What are they collecting exactly? Data brokers often refer to themselves as database marketers or consumer data analytics companies. They collect the information of an individual as a consumer.

The online meeting looks for any clues or information that can identify the individual and describe their interests or hobbies. The more exclusive and detailed the report, the more it costs.

Offline data is something that is not easily acquired. These include police reports or any legal information. Most data brokers will pay someone to acquire that information for them.

Curious users bought their own data. The results received show that they sell the data to the average person for about $ 50. In general, this depends on the amount of information. Some have confirmed that everything is there in detail, and others that the information is distorted.

What’s in the reports?

– Name

– Address

– Gender

– Email address

– Social media accounts

– Preferences

– Hobbies

– Recent searches or likes

– Credit scores

– Property records

– Short records

– Driver’s license and motor vehicle records.

– Census data

– Birth certificates

– Marriage licenses

– Divorce records

– State registries of professional and recreational licenses.

– Voting registration information

– Bankruptcy records

As with major companies, even data brokers merge collected information with others. They have an opt-out service. Deleting data from your website costs $ 129 per year permanently.

Data mining companies are very similar. Firms collect vast amounts of data and analyze raw materials. Data mining is the analytical process of discovering patterns in large data sets involving machine learning methods, statistics, and database systems.

Some of these companies include:

– Anaconda

– IBM

– Oracle data mining

– Portrait software

– Quantum Leap Innovations

– Terradata.

People search websites

If you’ve been looking for a long-lost family member, ancestor, or friend from school, chances are their data is still on the internet. Most of the people who search for websites store all the data. Everything you have submitted is stored on their servers.

Some of these websites also have an opt-out service:

– Any

– verified

– classmates

– PeopleFinder

– Pipl

– Spokeo

– White pages.

Accessories

Internet browser plugins or extensions can be extremely useful. However, recent research has shown that lately popular VPN add-ons are tracking users at every move. The paradox of the plugin that is supposed to mainly hide the IP address of the users, while tracking them.

Others, on the other hand, are vulnerable to DNS attack. Which means someone could be looking at your url bar. If you visited a website, it doesn’t mean they don’t know you. What you don’t know is that the website you visited could see your IP address. In other words, it is very similar to when you tell someone your name and address.

Best Tracking Companies

The most popular trackers today are:

– Add this

– DNA

– Double click

– Facebook

– Google

– Dashboard investigation

Data tracking companies primarily organize data into categories. This makes it much easier to remove it from the system when necessary. For example, marketing companies are making an advertisement for a retail company and are looking for a certain group of consumers. The system will point to a specific description.

Consumer categorization is nothing new. The simple act of using privacy software like Identity Theft Preventer can indicate how much we as users make readily available on our computers and web browsers, without even being aware of it.

The reason that companies and cybercriminals collect so much information is the cookie that remains in the browser. Only 25% of internet users have been shown to clean the web browser regularly. Which makes the rest of them easy to target. “The Internet never forgets”, so how much exactly does it accumulate in us over time?