Yes, you heard it right, as according to a study by Princeton University, Google is aggressively focused on the usage of tracking cookies to monitor the web usage of consumers across the globe Google Analytics, the application which enable users to keep a track of the traffic on webpages is integrated with almost 70 per cent of the global webpages. What’s more concerning is that as per the study, social media giants including Facebook and Twitter are also involved in tracking the internet activities of consumers across the globe. A cookie comes as a code which some webpages integrate with a user’s browser. And while some cookies help you to remain logged in to your preferred websites such as Facebook, they can also be harnessed for keeping a close eye on your web related movements for pushing targeted advertisements as per your browsing activity. There is also a dark side attached to cookie based tracking as the National Security Agency of the United States reportedly harness a cookie tracking mechanism from tech giant Google to recognize users it may eventually want to hack. Cookies also share information to third party agencies which can create a profile of the user from the accumulated data. A similar mechanism is practiced by Facebook which already possess the confidential data of millions of users, while additional information from the cookies add more data to the profiles maintained by the company. The university research also highlights that webpages of Sports, News and Arts do the most tracking to push more advertisements to web users, owing to a lack of any additional revenue stream. According to the experts, the answer to the increasing tracking activities on web platforms is to use Cookie blockers which will restrict the flow of your confidential data to tracking agencies. Experts also believe that while many browsers do inform websites to not to track the user data, the request is plainly rejected by many websites.
