Blog: Sites Feed Personal Details to New Tracking Industry

Sites Feed Personal Details to New Tracking Industry
Wall Street Journal (07/30/10) Angwin, Julia; McGinty, Tom

Wall Street Journal (WSJ) investigators have found that the largest U.S. Web sites are installing new, intrusive consumer-tracking software on user's computers. The WSJ examined the 50 most popular Web sites in the United States, which account for about 40 percent of total U.S. page views, to measure the quantity and capabilities of the trackers installed on a user's computer. The 50 sites installed a total of 3,180 tracking files on a test computer used in the study. Only one site, Wikipedia.org, installed no trackers, while 12 sites installed more than 100 tracking tools each. The companies that used the most tracking tools were Google, Microsoft, and Quantcast; however, they claim to not track individuals by name and offer users a way to remove themselves from the tracking networks. Some tracking programs can record and analyze a user's keystrokes for content, tone, and clues to their social connections. Some of the tracking tools also allowed data-gathering companies to build personal profiles that could include age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status, and health concerns, in addition to recent purchases and favorite TV shows and movies. The growing use of tracking technologies has begun to raise regulatory concerns, and Congress is considering laws that would limit tracking.

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