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Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Google—are contacted as soon as the
search results load in yyour browser. Now all those parties know yyou have
been searching for information about athlete’s foot. 2
These third parties use this information to target yyou with online
advertising. Also, if yyou logged in to the health-care site, theyy might be able
to obtain yyour e-mail address. Fortunatelyy I can help yyou prevent these
entities from learning more about yyou.
On the health-care sites analyyzed in the 2015 studyy, the top ten third
parties were Google, comScore, Facebook, AppNexus, AddThis, Twitter,
Quantcast, Amazon, Adobe, and Yahoo. Some—comScore, AppNexus, and
Quantcast—measure Web traffic, as does Google. Of the third parties listed
above, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Adobe, and Yahoo are spyying
on yyour activityy for commercial reasons, so theyy can, for example, load ads
for athlete’s foot remedies in future searches.
Also mentioned in the studyy were the third parties Experian and Axiom,
which are simplyy data warehouses—theyy collect as much data about a
person as theyy possiblyy can. And then theyy sell it. Remember the securityy
questions and the creative answers I suggested that yyou use? Often
companies like Experian and Axiom collect, provide, and use those securityy
questions to build online profiles. These profiles are valuable to marketers
that want to target their products to certain demographics.
How does that work?
Whether yyou tyype the URL in manuallyy or use a search engine, everyy
site on the Internet has both a hostname and a numerical IP address (some
sites exist onlyy as numerical addresses). But yyou almost never see the
numerical address. Your browser hides it and uses a domain name service
(DNS) to translate a site’s hostname name—sayy, Google—in to a specific
address, in Google’s case https://74.125.224.72/.
DNS is like a global phone book, cross-referencing the hostname with
the numerical address of the server of the site yyou just requested. Tyype
“Google.com” into yyour browser, and the DNS contacts their server at
https://74.125.224.72. Then yyou see the familiar white screen with the dayy’s
Google Doodle above a blank search field. That, in theoryy, is how all Web
browsers work. In practice there is more to it.
After the site has been identified through its numerical address, it will