Got Privacy? Tracking Your Every Move Through The Internet
Its no secret anymore; Online advertising is lucrative because it is sociologically representative of the individual. Traffic habits, economic status , and now geographic location can be accessed fairly easily by big business or the federal government.
In 2008/2009, Microsoft Users’ IP addresses were used to identify when a person moved their place of residence, and where they moved to.
The chief issue here is that a system such as this would enable certain advertisers (ex. Google ) to be able to subvert the new “do not track” legislation being deliberated over in congress. The first step was categorizing IP addresses as “travel” if they are located 250 miles or more away from the users home or “home” for residential areas.
A solid 90 percent of the “travel” IP addresses were linked to a notebook, making the method significantly accurate. It is the silly belief of Microsoft that this method would be used to develop more targeted advertising. Unfortunately, the potential to abuse this for data mining and spying is much too great.
It has been shown that key search phrases such as “car” and “inn” were linked to mobile notebook searches where as other phrases like “employment” and “education” were more correlative to home or work IP addresses.
This comes as no coincidence shortly after Microsoft’s announcement that IE9 would have a “do no track” feature that big web advertising moguls would find a way around it. Apparently the tracking protection only works for a portion of websites making it about as effective as a real bouncer would be at stopping online tracking.
Sources Include:
Related Posts:
Read more at theintelhub.com
No comments:
Post a Comment