Surprise! It's another one of these.
This site uses
Google Analytics
to log anonymous data.
Like what?
Like
which pages
are visited,
when
they are visited,
and
which towns or cities
people are (probably) visiting from.
It
doesn't
track things like your name or address, and it
can't
because your computer doesn't give out that kind of information.
It also
gives your computer
scribbled notes
that your computer repeatedly sends back.
What?
On the internet, clicking a link is like mailing a letter where the return address is
a bunch of letters and numbers with no name.
The letter you get back is one web page, and you must send a new letter to request each page.
One person might send these requests from different addresses, and different people might request the same page from the same address, which means the website doesn't even know
whether two requests came from the same person.
They compensate for this by giving your computer notes in a text file that your computer must send back with
Every. Single. Request.
This allows the site to keep track of information such as
whether you have read this message already
and
which pages are viewed the most.
The string of scribbled notes is called a
COOKIE.
Surprise.
It
also
allows advertising companies to do the same thing, and each company might do this at many websites.
Do they/you know everything about me?
No.
But don't cookies allow them to know everything I'm doing??
The Internet is engineered to allow your computer to communicate with
"something".
This is usually a website, or a thing with a website address (like "cesoid.com").
Your computer runs software called a
"browser"
(such as Chrome) to do this.
Browsers
only send cookies
back
to websites that
created
them.
Even an advertisement appearing on cesoid.com has
separate cookies
that your browser would not send to cesoid.com, and your browser
would not send cookies from cesoid.com to the advertising website. For these reasons, nobody
can use a cookie that tells them
everything
that you're doing.
So how do they seem to know exactly what to advertise to me?
Advertisers seem to know so much about you because, even if they don't know who you
are and can't read cookies that belong to other websites, a lot of websites allow them to
send and receive a cookie, which means they have collected a long list containing many of websites you've visited, and also they share
a lot of (often anonymous) information with other companies. It's not so much that
cookies give them new kinds of information, as it is that many of the websites
you visit add a little bit of information, and those websites share information about you
to advertisers, even if it is just
which
site you're visiting, and cookies allow them to tell which bits of information pertain to the same person.
Advertisers don't need your name or your ID number to sell you something, and they
don't want it, because having that information subjects them to more regulations, but,
more importantly, your name doesn't tell them what you want to buy.
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