Search Engines Are These Yet Another Opportunity For Companies To Take Note Of Our Habits?
We call at the shops and are given loyalty cards. We can gain points by presenting our card as we buy. The more we spend, the the faster the points we get. With some loyalty cards we are sent special offers for articles we purchase regularly. Well if the shop knows what we purchase regularly, they are surely observing our shopping.
Yes, this is the obvious reason for their loyalty cards. These shops want to know what we are purchasing. Which consumers buy what. Who they need to be advertising certain things to. Well, we all know this really, but we like the thought of getting money back, or fuel, or special treats, so we take the loyalty card despite ourselves. Even our banks are now aware when we go away, and if we have not advised them of this before we go, our bank cards are frozen, to protect us from fraud, but again it demonstrates how our movements are being tracked.
So now with the development of the Internet Business, we buy over the internet. We may Work From Home and think to use the web to search for things we need. This may be as easy as doing our monthly supermarket shopping on line. If we do, we will see the next time we go to the virtual shop, many of the Online Jobs are completed for us, we do not have to remember all the things we added to our basket last time, and which part of the virtual supermarket they are, the internet site remembers we like these things and prompts us to place them in our basket.
If we are using a search engine for random queries, we start typing our query and are prompted by queries we have entered before – is this what we are after again?
As I Work From Home, I often use a web based bookstore to find specific books I may require. I am prompted to confirm that it is me and not somebody else who is searching through their company site, then they let me know, as I search, what other people who have made similar purchases also bought. So, they know who I am, what I have bought in the past and what other folk with similar tastes have also bought. The Internet Business is certainly very complex!
When we search through web pages, looking for data, perhaps in relation to something we have read, we may often see a counter on an internet site, advising how many folk have visited this web page. They are monitoring traffic through their web page. It could be they want to know which pages are of most interest to other folk, or it could be they just want a general idea of how popular their web page is, but somehow when we click on their web page, they know.
As we all do lots more Online Jobs and tasks we would have gone to the library to do previously, or gone to the local high street with cash, we leave a trail which is simple to follow. We are making ourselves visible to the outside world and anyone who wants to follow us in our virtual world can do it quite effortlessly.
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