A cartoon in the New Yorker magazine from 1993 showed two dogs at a computer, with one saying to the other, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”That may no longer be true.A new analysis of online consumer data shows that large Web companies are learning more than ever before the gritty details of what people search for and do on the Internet, gathering clues about the tastes and preferences of a typical user several hundred times a month.These companies use that information to predict what content and advertisers people most likely want to see. They can charge steep prices for carefully tailored ads because of their high response rates.
http://iht.com/articles/2008/03/10/technology/privacy.phpOnline Behavior Tracking: No Such Thing as Enough
Every time you go online, you leave electronic footprints — and someone is following them. When you display a page, enter a search query, play a video or click on an ad online, that information is logged by the servers of the companies that own the site or serve the video or ad or search results. Those are some of the findings comScore came up with in response to a project it jointly worked on with The New York Times’ Louise Story to find out how much data Web companies can collect from users.
ecommercetimes.com/story/Online-Behavior-Tracking-No-Such-Thing-as-Enough-62051.html
Web companies track users’ Internet activity hundreds of times per month
… A new analysis of online consumer data shows that large Web companies are learning more than ever before the gritty details of what people search for and do on the Internet, gathering clues about the tastes and preferences of a typical user several hundred times a month.