I Spy on the Internet

Written by Pat's Papers | Saturday, 31 July 2010 8:20 AM

According to the Wall Street Journal, the fastest growing Internet business is the business of spying on people. The first in a series of investigative pieces, the Journal says they discovered that 50 of the top websites in the country were responsible for installing, on average, 64 pieces of tracking technology onto a visitor’s computer with no warning. Also, the cookies that are being installed are much more sophisticated and can tell what someone is doing on a particular website in real time. All of this adds up to a robust business for companies that then sell the information to advertisers. As the Journal put it, “the goal is to make sophisticated assumptions in real time—plans for a summer vacation, the likelihood of repaying a loan—and sell those conclusions.”

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