How much are you worth online to companies?

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It is no subconscious fact that Google keeps a tab on what all you are doing on the Internet. From your searches to links you click to websites y'all visit to the IP address y'all logged in from and other personal information – everything is available with Google. If anyone wants to "go you", he just needs to hack into Google servers… Isn't that scary? Following Google, Facebook has as well entered into the market of selling your information.

FOR Sale: You! Location: Internet! Your data is available through these sellers: Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more! Cost: Unknown!

Ever wondered how much you lot are worth online?

We'll talk about methods used to collect your data – both personal and browsing information – that might help you determine your worth online.

You Are Being Tracked!

I call them spambots and adbots. They follow you lot everywhere you lot continue the Net. They tape your activities:

What links yous click,
What pages yous visit,
Which pages retain you,
What kind of pages repel you,
Which office of pages do you spend more than time on,
What are yous searching,
Where did yous login from,
What is your gender,
What is your age and more than!

Y'all might wonder what Google or any other company would exercise with the data it collects. Why would any company spend time and money on tracking your online activities? Fine, at that place are some so-chosen customer improvement programs that permit you lot to opt-out from beingness monitored. These are generally the ones you lot get when installing whatever software saying "Help u.s. improve by sending us anonymous usage statistics…" An example is the image below.

Unchecking such boxes gives a sense of satisfaction – Google or whatsoever other company is no more tracking you. But that is an illusion: you are beingness tracked. Yous are being tracked not only by search engines and social media sites but besides past different online advert agencies and third-party companies.

What Happens To Information Related To You?

Google, Facebook, and others like them say that tracking yous, helps them provide you with more targeted adverts. The same applies to other social media sites. Ever wondered why Twitter shows you promoted tweets on topics that interest you? Did you observe LinkedIn shows yous cloth relevant to your activities on the Net? I am not being a skeptic. This is the truth.

And that is why Internet Explorer has a list of Tracking Protection in Internet Explorer (TPL). These lists help preclude tracking your activities when you are online. You lot need to install these TPLs manually. I would recommend adding the ones from Abine.

How To Protect Privacy On Chrome And Firefox

While Net Explorer has the TPLs, in that location are some other extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Most such extensions are developed by the aforementioned companies and are customized for Chrome, Firefox, and even for other browsers like Safari and Opera. Like shooting fish in a barrel List is one such company. Abine besides has extensions for Chrome. I am not sure if it has any for Firefox, Opera and Safari as I do not utilise these browsers. I utilise an extension from Abine for tracking protection on Chrome. Cheque out the screenshot of what the extension displays when I visit the Microsoft website.

How Do Websites Collect Data?

This is such a complex topic that a research paper tin be written on information technology. To summarize it, well-nigh websites have mini codes that they place on the site for different purposes – not essentially for tracking you.

For case, if a website contains share buttons, the buttons are collecting information on what all are y'all sharing from that website. The website possessor may or may not know virtually data being transferred to third parties. In some cases, there are codes that proceed a watch on what y'all are doing on the website, and when you lot navigate away, where exercise you go and how (by clicking a link or by typing a URL in the browser). These companies collect data about you and sell it off to different online advertising companies that so use that data to provide you with targeted adverts. And since you are looking for similar cloth, you lot are more than likely to autumn for the adverts they present to yous.

The network is huge and presents all over the Internet. In fact, the Internet cannot function properly without these snippets and share buttons. If you accept a website, you will desire to put up share buttons so that people can share your posts easily. It is a different matter that these buttons also store data about what all you are sharing. As I said before, the process is circuitous and I can't imagine how it works. All I could grasp is that you lot, as a client, are an ID. All the data pertaining to your usage of the Internet is grouped nether that ID. This data is then sold or used for profits.

How Much Are Y'all Worth Online?

I would rephrase the above question every bit to how much does Google and others earn by using your Internet usage data. There is no definite figure but experts say it can be anything between 7 cents to few dollars per annum. The more you use the Cyberspace, the more is your value. And in instance it sounds like a very small-scale amount, try to imagine how many people use the Internet daily or fifty-fifty monthly. Based on that estimate, you can effort to calculate how much does Google and others earn by collecting and using your data.

If yous are getting worried now, there are several free tools to fix and preclude data collection

Arun Kumar is a Microsoft MVP alumnus, obsessed with engineering science, especially the Internet. He deals with the multimedia content needs of training and corporate houses. Follow him on Twitter @PowercutIN