swhx7
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join:2006-07-23
Elbonia
 ·RoadRunner Cable
| More information on the revamped co.
This article: »www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/20···_nebuad/ says that the new company will be in the business of building profiles of web surfers by means of "web bugs" in web pages, rather than by trying to intercept users' traffic at the ISP.
As you may know, the "web bugs" are small image in pages. They are hosted on third-party servers, so those servers get hits when the pages are loaded (when the user doesn't have any sort of blocking in place). The third party's server logs then accumulate the surfers' IP addresses. Combine this with giving the image files unique names in the tags on the pages, and you have a tracking mechanism.
Of course this is old-school in the history of web advertising. But it's usually been done directly as part of advertising packages. The new twist seems to be that this company will be spying on users in this way to accumulate data on visitors to the sites, even if there aren't ads on the page. This data then will be sold to advertisers.
It's less evil than intercepting all your data at the ISP. And it's easy to block if you know how - just google "web bug". |
