Online Advertising And Privacy

Online advertising has become one of the most used means to inform or persuade individual to buy a good or service or to adhere to an idea or ideology. Advertising is one of the most successful ways to gain new customers or to maintain good relationships with current or old customers but it is often used excessively and at the expense of the internet user, in both terms of nuisance and privacy issues that are created by this advertising technique.\n\nInternet advertising has implications on the privacy and anonymity of internet users in a way that will be explained here. For instance, if an advertising company has placed banners on a specific web site, or on more websites, the existence of third-party cookies make it easy for the company to track the browsing users across the websites. Third-party cookies may however be blocked by most users and this will increase the users’ privacy and will reduce the tracking by advertising and tracking companies. implicitly, blocking third-party cookies does not affect negatively the user’s experience on the internet.\n\nBut how do cookies work? Cookies are generally sent only to the server setting them but in cases in which web pages contain images or other components which are stored on servers of other domains, the cookies may reach those other domains as third-party cookies. Although the standards for cookies do not allow for default third-party cookies, most internet browsers do allow for these cookies to be sent automatically to a third party, especially if the third-party website has a Compact Privacy Policy published. \n\nThe setting of cookies is governed by laws all over the world, each of them being meant to protect the privacy of the internet user. In the United State, the laws on setting cookies was approved in 2000 and several scandals involving public institutions have been caused by infringing these laws.\n