EOC Week 5: The Web's New Gold Mine: Your Secrets

  After reading the article of "The Web's New Gold Mine: Your Secrets", I was fascinated how us as social media/internet users are now the product instead of being what we thought ... the consumer. This Journal investigation finds that one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet is the business of spying on all of us consumers. 
   "The Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry."
    The study found that the nation's top websites each had installed 64 pieces of tracking technology into them. Tracking technology has grown immensely since the dot.com boom of the 1990s. This time era is the first time we ever saw anything such as advertising online. 

   The most disturbing part of this article that I found was the "third party" tracking files. These work in the way that The first time a site is visited, it then will install a new tracking file. These tracking files assign the computer a unique ID number! Consumer tracking is the foundation of an online advertising economy. This industry has racked up $23 billion in ad spending just in the last year. I think this is a very powerful and informative article, it spreads the awareness of our very personal information that we thought was "unseen", is not only being seen, but sold and shared. This is the business of spying on internet users.