Tracking on the Internet

04-04-23 00 / episode: 78

Script

Tracking on the internet.

What's that? Well, first of all, you have to realize when you go on onto the internet, there are things about you that you have to tell the other people.

If you go to the Amazon store, you have to tell them a little bit about who you are so that they can send you the page to look at.

Ok.

Now you're gonna send them that information through the browser and they're going to respond and they're gonna put cookies on your browser.

A cookie is a small piece of information that they can use that way.

They know you are you.

So if you buy some products, they don't send your products to the wrong person.

And the next time you go back, you can see which products you bought because they know who you are because they've got that cookie on your machine.

It's really, really a good thing in principle except people like to use it for not so good things.

What they do then is they keep track of you.

They follow you with that cookie and then they try to find out all the places that you're visiting on the internet.

That way they can find out what you're interested in, what you're not interested in and they can try to sell you things that they think you're gonna buy.

Since I'm a man, they're not gonna sell me.

Many women's products.

If they track me, they know that I'm not interested in that.

That leads to problems.

We lose privacy and we go into a filter bubble.

That means I don't see the whole internet.

I only see what they choose to show me because they've been tracking me.

And when I open their pages, they're not gonna show me some products.

They're gonna show me a very narrow range of products that they think I might like.

That's a problem as I grow and develop and change because I want to see new products and I lose the opportunity to see new things.

Tracking is a big problem on the internet, but most people don't know it, do you know much about it? It pays to do a little bit of research.