Description: What is online tracking? Online advertising is big business. According to industry groups, revenues for online ads exceeded $150 billion USD in 2021 and continue to grow every year. Those ads are powered by online tracking, profiling, and targeting: a vast corporate surveillance network that harvests and analyzes our every click, query, and more. The average web page shares
Online advertising is big business. According to industry groups, revenues for online ads exceeded $150 billion USD in 2021 and continue to grow every year. Those ads are powered by online tracking, profiling, and targeting: a vast corporate surveillance network that harvests and analyzes our every click, query, and more. The average web page shares data with dozens of third parties. The average mobile app does the same, and many apps collect highly sensitive information like location, even when they’re not
In order to target ads to users based on their online behaviors, the ad-tech industry relies on sophisticated tracking techniques that collect information about users as they browse the web and interact with apps on their mobile devices. Users are tagged with unique identifiers to pinpoint them and categorize their consumer behaviors into cohorts and micro-audiences: users from a certain neighborhood who are interested in used Audi cars, for instance. On mobile devices, advertisers can use an identifier pro
Princeton researchers found that the vast majority of online tracking comes from large tech firms such as Google and Facebook, and is disproportionately on sites that rely heavily on advertising revenue like news and arts websites.