The iSpies

This morning I had read an article in the Wall Street Journal called The iSpies. This article was written by Julia Angwin and in this article she had talked about how the tracking of consumers is really more widespread and more intrusive than more people realize. A 26 year old female named Ashley Hayes-Beaty’s is being monitored by Lotame Solutions. Lotame Solutions is a company that uses sophisticated software called a “beacon” to capture what people are typing onto the internet. Lotame is able to package up all of the information they find from monitoring people around the world and put them into anonymous profiles. These anonymous profiles are then sold to marketers and they say that spying on web users has become one of the fastest growing businesses on the Internet. Last year consumer tracking had racked up to $23 billion in ad spending last year. Before they had found new technology monitoring used to be limited to mainly “cookie” files that record websites people visit. But these new tools are able to instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even some medical conditions. All of the information that companies find are anonymous and all of the internet users are identified only by a number assigned to their computer. I personally don’t like what these types of companies are doing because how am I supposed to be able to go on my Internet without someone going into my business or even selling my business. How would I know if someone is tracking my computer? Do these companies really make a lot of money off of selling other peoples information? I don’t get why they just can’t track their own computers instead of everyone around the world.