Reducing the number of tracking technologies employed by websites is one thing I’m quite passionate about. For me, the web has become too much of a commercial space with more and more people and companies wanting to know everything about us, with the primary aim of targeting us with personalised adverts in an attempt to part u with our cash.
If you’ve read any of my blogs so far, you’ll know very well that I’m a huge advocate of running a pi-hole in your network, in an attempt to stop advertising companies knowing your every move on the web.
In this post, I’ll look at just a small handful of the tracking technologies used by companies to try to understand our online activities, most of which can be thwarted with tools like the pi-hole.
Cookie anyone?
I’ll start by talking about the most common tracking tool – the cookie.
For those who don’t know what cookies are, they are small text files generated by a web server which are placed on your device to be returned to the web server during your next interaction. This file allows the web server to maintain knowledge of your visits and actions.
When Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the WWW, he never foresaw the expansion of his creation outside the realm of academia, so as such, he never thought that one day we might need to create relationships between two separate web activities.
The use of cookies came after the commercialisation of the WWW and are used for the sole purpose of tracking your activities from one web page interaction to another.
For example, if you visit a site such as Amazon and place an item in your basket, a cookie is placed on your machine which identifies the item, its price, the date, the time, and much more.
When you go to your basket to checkout, this cookie is passed back to the server so the correct data can be placed in the dynamic page you get presented with.
In most cases, the cookie you receive identifies you and your activity, but normally doesn’t contain any human readable information, but rather a unique value that is used as a look up by the web server to determine the true data it represents, so it is useless to anyone other than the one who issued it.
On the whole, cookies used in this way are perfectly fine and harmless and are a necessity of modern web browsing. Without cookies, eCommerce would be a whole lot harder to perform.
3rd party cookies
Some companies pay to have their cookies hosted inside other peoples web pages. These cookies are updated with data as you browse the site and its these cookies that are used to track users from one web site to another.
The data these cookies store will differ from one to the other, but quite often they will store the same data as the cookie from the site you visit alongside more specific data such as browser type, location data, IP address and much more.
If you visit a second site that uses the same cookie as the site you obtained the original one from, this data can be exchanged – thus the owners of the tracking cookie now know that you visited the two sites and over time build up a picture of you and the things you like.
Website owners can make a great deal of money by allowing others to place their tracking tools within their sites, and make even more by selling they data they obtain themselves to others.
Companies around the world pay millions each year to have their cookies hosted in other peoples web pages for the sole purpose of tracking user behaviour so that they can better market their goods and services.
If you want to visualise the interactions created by cookies from advertising companies, install the “lightbeam” plug-in in the Firefox browser.
This plug-in displays a nice graphic showing each cookie you obtain as you browse the web, and who shares the data they collect.
One of the most commonly seen tracking cookies is from “DoubleClick”; this cookie is just one of the many different cookies owned by Google that allows them to track users across millions of web pages.
DoubleClick was a private advertising company set up in 1996 that was purchased by Google in 2008 for USD $3.1 billion
DoubleClick offers technology products and services that are sold primarily to advertising agencies and media companies to allow clients to traffic, target, deliver, and report on their interactive advertising campaigns.
DoubleClick’s main product line was known as DART (Dynamic Advertising, Reporting, and Targeting), which was designed for advertisers and publishers.
DART automated the administration effort in the ad-buying cycle for advertisers (DoubleClick Bid Manager) and the management of ad inventory for publishers (DoubleClick for Publishers).
Its sole purpose was to increase the purchasing efficiency of advertisers and to minimise unsold inventory for publishers.
When google purchaced DoubleClick, they re-modelled DART and merged it into the new Google Marketing Platform brand. DoubleClick Bid Manager became Display and Video 360, DoubleClick Search became Search Ads 360, and DoubleClick for Publishers became Google Ad Manager 360
If a website has bought into the DoubleClick model, a DoubleClick cookie is placed on each visitors machine that records the following details:-
- Web browser
- Operating System
- IP address
- ISP
- Bandwidth
- Time of day
This data is passed back to DoubleClick where it will be analysed along with the data collected by other cookies such as those collected from Amazon, etc. to build up very accurate profiles of users.
This data is then placed into the DoubleClick Advertising Exchange where it is traded between advertisers and publishers much like a traditional stock exchange.
If, for example, a company wants to run an ad campaign targeting all males aged between 25-35 in a specific location that are using Apple Macs, who also like outdoor sports, then they can buy this data and then sell back an advert specific to the exact demographic they want to target.
In 2022, Google’s revenue from its advertising platforms was USD $224.7 Billion
Your data is big money to these people.
Ads are annoying
there is a lot of psychology used in marketing and to ensure that people don’t get swamped by too many ads from the same campaign, the system uses a mechanism called frequency capping.
Frequency capping is a term in advertising that means restricting (capping) the number of times (frequency) a specific visitor to a website is shown a particular advertisement. This restriction is applied to all websites that serve ads from the same advertising network.
For example, a frequency cap could be 3 views/visitor/24-hours.
This means after viewing a specific advert 3 times, that visitor will not see it again for 24 hours. This feature uses further cookies to remember the number of times the ad has been seen – called the impression count.
Some people don’t mind the adverts and the ways in which we are tracked online.
Imagine you visit Amazon and view a book, but don’t buy it. Amazon store data such as the book title, genre, author, publisher and much more in the cookie.
So do the advertisers.
When you visit another site, lets say Thompson Holidays, the advertisers can place an ad for the very same book (or similar by the same author) in the web page of the villa you are considering renting – people like to read on holiday, right?
Is this a bad thing? Surely the use of tracking cookies like this is a good thing – reminding you of things you might want to buy so you don’t have to go hunting for it?
Maybe it is, but maybe it isn’t. Below is a well-known story about customer tracking which went slightly wrong…
In 2012, Target (large American retailer) started sending coupons for baby items to customers based on the tracking analytics they had obtained from their browsing histories and purchases.
One day, an angry man went into a Target store outside of Minneapolis, demanding to talk to a manager:
“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”
The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer, and sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture alongside pictures of smiling babies.
The manager apologised to the man for the mistake and, placated, the man left the store.
The store manager couldn’t work out how such a mistake could be made, and so called the man at home a few days later to apologise further.
On the phone, though, the father was somewhat embarrassed.
“I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”
All this embarrassment because of the wrong sort of tracking!
No cookies thanks – I’m on a diet
So what can you do to stem the flow of your data into other people’s hands?
If you want to stop tracking cookies, there are a few things you can do that will help your cause…
- Build a pi-hole!
- Delete existing cookies – this can be done via the options in your browser, or you can use the wonderful tool that is Ccleaner (www.piriform.com)
- Set the “do not track” option in your browser. This acts as a message to websites that you do not wish to accept third-party tracking cookies. Unfortunately, websites do not have to honour this message, so don’t rely on it, but it might help.
- Install an ad blocking plug-in in your browser such as “ad block”, or “Ghostery”.
NOTE: Many websites run scripts which can detect your use of ad-blocking plug-ins and will refuse you entry unless you switch the tool off. However, most websites cannot detect your use of a pi-hole.
I’ll continue this dive into tracking technologies in the next post…