Web tracking

Web tracking is the practice by which operators of websites and third parties collect, store and share information about visitors' activities on the World Wide Web. Analysis of a user's behaviour may be used to provide content that enables the operator to infer their preferences and may be of interest to various parties, such as advertisers. Web tracking can be part of visitor management.

Web tracking is the practice by which operators of websites and third parties collect, store and share information about visitors' activities on the World Wide Web. Analysis of a user's behaviour may be used to provide content that enables the operator to infer their preferences and may be of interest to various parties, such as advertisers. Web tracking can be part of visitor management. ==Uses== The uses of web tracking include the following: Advertising companies actively collect information about users and make profiles that are used to individualize advertisements. User activities include websites visited, watched videos, interactions on social networks, and online transactions. Online streaming services collect information about what shows users watch, which helps them suggest more shows that they might like. Search engines may keep a record of what users search for, which could help them suggest more relevant searches in the future. Law enforcement agencies may use web tracking to spy on individuals and solve crimes. Web analytics focuses more on the performance of a website as a whole. Web tracking will give insight on how a website is being used and see how long a user spends on a certain page. This can be used to see who may have the most interest in the content of the website. Usability tests is the practice of testing how easy a design is to use. Users are observed as they complete tasks. This would help identify usability problems with a website's design so they can be fixed for easier navigation. ==Methods== ===IP address=== Every device connected to the Internet is assigned a unique IP address, which is needed to enable devices to communicate with each other. With appropriate software on the host website, the IP address of visitors to the site can be logged and can also be used to determine the visitor's geographical location. Logging the IP address can, for example, monitor if a person voted more than once, as well as their viewing pattern. Knowing the visitor's location indicates, besides other things, the country. This may, for example, result in prices being quoted in the local currency, the price or the range of goods that are available, special conditions applying and in some cases requests from or responses to a certain country being blocked entirely. Internet users may circumvent censorship and geo-blocking and protect personal identity and location to stay anonymous on the internet using a VPN connection. ===HTTP cookie=== An HTTP cookie is code and information embedded onto a user's device by a website when the user visits the website. The website might then retrieve the information on the cookie on subsequent visits to the website by the user. Cookies can be used to customise the user's browsing experience and to deliver targeted ads. Some browsing activities that cookies can store are: pages and content a user browsed, what a user searched online, when a user clicked on an online advertisement, what time a user visited a site. ===First- and third-party cookies=== A first-party cookie is created by the website the user is visiting. The main goal of first-party cookies is usually to recognize the user and their preferences so that their desired settings can be applied. A third-party cookie is created by websites other than the one a user visits. They insert additional tracking code that can record a user's online activity. On-site analytics refers to data collection on the current site. It is used to measure many aspects of user interactions, including the number of times a user visits. Restrictions on third-party cookies introduced by web browsers are bypassed by some tracking companies using a technique called CNAME cloaking, where a third-party tracking service is assigned a DNS record in the first-party origin domain (usually CNAME) so that it's masqueraded as first-party even though it's a separate entity in legal and organizational terms. This technique is blocked by some browsers and ad blockers using block lists of known trackers. ===ETags=== ==References==

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1365481313 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.