Are you seeing the same advertisement on all the websites that you are surfing? Then probably you are one among those millions who are being targeted by digital marketing firms who buy data from tech giants such as Google, Yahoo, Bing and Facebook.
Nowadays, as soon as you search for a product online, the web search giant sells that data to advertisement firms that then sell that info to product selling companies based on the profile info of the searching person like gender, interest, age and such.
And the company that bids the most for such search results will get an opportunity to target that user with a relevant promotion for weeks or sometimes months.
To curtail such data sharing and selling practices of online firms, some governments operating in west have imposed some restricting legislation on such digital promotional activities. Even so, web search giants find some loopholes in such legislation/s and try to exploit the web user to the core.
However, a lot depends on the online user who is surfing a website as they can dodge such promotional practices with some smart thinking. Usually, websites have to display a pop up that they will keep a track of the user in the name of ‘Cookies’. And users can avoid such pop ups by reading the displayed info in complete and then taking a wise decision thereafter.
German Association for Data Protection is urging users to surf with logic when on internet. As the tech giants can easily sniff details such as the OS running on the device of the user and then create a comprehensive profile of him/her based on the products or services they are surfing on the website.
Users should also share no personal details on social media platforms, as it can spell trouble for them in the long run.
Perhaps for the privacy conscious people who screech for data security, using DuckDuckGo, Startpage or MetaGer can help to a certain extent as they disallow search engines from figuring out the activities of the online users, respectively.
Note 1- Firefox was once considered being the safest browsers among the current lot. But these days there is not much difference on it from others.
Note 2- Cookies are not always troublesome as they help save the shopping preferences of a user of the device and also help remember their usernames and passwords and are easy to delete and control.
