Who Is Spying On Us On The Internet?
Creepy People Are Following You Around With Cookies!
This is a very well researched and interesting article from The Wall Street Journal of December 2010.
You can see the whole article here : Creepy Marketers Are After You!
The article has a very great deal of data which is not here.
What is reproduced below is WSJ estimates of the behavior of the top 50 US Websites.
Omg are those people misbehaving!
The Exposure Index is WSJ's calculated estimate of your danger of being tracked via each site.
The Trackers column is the actual number of trackers they found connected with each site. Yikes!
Generally the tracker data is sold to marketers by each collecting site. For money.
This means a path of everywhere you've been since you last got rid of your browser cookies.
From Wall Street Journal:
Marketers are spying on Internet users -- observing and remembering people's clicks, and building and selling detailed dossiers of their activities and interests. The Wall Street Journal's What They Know series documents the new, cutting-edge uses of this Internet-tracking technology. The Journal analyzed the tracking files installed on people's computers by the 50 most popular U.S. websites, plus WSJ.com. The Journal also built an "exposure index" -- to determine the degree to which each site exposes visitors to monitoring -- by studying the tracking technologies they install and the privacy policies that guide their use.
dictionary.com |
 |
234 |
merriam-webster.com |
 |
131 |
comcast.net |
|
151 |
careerbuilder.com |
|
118 |
photobucket.com |
|
127 |
msn.com |
|
207 |
answers.com |
 |
120 |
yp.com |
|
89 |
msnbc.com |
|
117 |
yahoo.com |
|
106 |
aol.com |
|
133 |
wiki.answers.com |
|
72 |
cnn.com |
|
72 |
about.com |
|
83 |
cnet.com |
|
81 |
verizonwireless.com |
|
90 |
imdb.com |
|
55 |
live.com |
|
115 |
att.com |
|
58 |
walmart.com |
|
66 |
bbc.co.uk |
|
45 |
ebay.com |
|
42 |
ehow.com |
|
55 |
amazon.com |
|
38 |
espn.com |
|
61 |
myspace.com |
|
108 |
wsj.com |
|
60 |
go.com |
|
68 |
chase.com |
|
31 |
ask.com |
 |
44 |
weather.com |
|
36 |
flickr.com |
|
34 |
wordpress.com |
|
25 |
target.com |
|
32 |
paypal.com |
|
23 |
linkedin.com |
|
20 |
mapquest.com |
|
38 |
mozilla.com |
|
21 |
bing.com |
|
59 |
twitter.com |
|
17 |
bankofamerica.com |
|
11 |
apple.com |
|
14 |
adobe.com |
|
30 |
microsoft.com |
|
41 |
facebook.com |
|
4 |
blogger.com |
|
8 |
google.com |
|
26 |
mywebsearch.com |
|
6 |
youtube.com |
|
14 |
craigslist.org |
|
4 |
wikipedia.org |
|
0 |
I must say I'm amazed at how low Facebook are on the list (4). Suspiciously low. Unbelievably low.
My information is that only Google does more tracking of people than Facebook does. And Facebook does it in a much much creepier and more insidious way. At least Google give you an off switch you can find and use.
I suspect that low number for Facebook means that Facebook only sell their information to 4 companies. They collect a massive amount of it on everyone, but keep it for using themselves. Instead of selling the info, they sell access to its use on their system by their advertisers. Which is triple sneaky..
Oh, LeeVidor.com should be on that table above too. At the very bottom, right under Wikipedia.
We score in negative, we don't even want to hear from you, far less follow you around!
