Search Engines Are These One More Chance For Companies To Monitor Our Habits?

We go to the shops and are given loyalty cards. We can obtain points by showing our card as we shop. The greater our spending, the the faster the points we get. With a lot of loyalty cards we are posted special offers for items we buy regularly. Hmm if the shop knows what we buy regularly, they are obviously observing our shopping.

Yes, this is the true reason for their loyalty cards. These businesses want to know what consumers are picking up. Which customers buy what. Who they have to be advertising particular items to. Well, we all know this in truth, but we like the suggestion of getting money back, or fuel, or special treats, so we take the loyalty card despite this knowledge. Even our banks are now alerted when we go on holiday, and if we have not updated them before we travel, our bank funds are frozen, to protect us from fraud, but again it reveals how our movements are being tracked.

So now with the development of the Internet Business, we make purchases on the net. We may Work From Home and think to use the net to search for items we want. This may be as simple as doing our normal supermarket shopping on the net. If we do, we will observe the next time we go to the virtual shop, many of the Online Jobs are completed for us, we do not need to remember all the things we popped in our basket last time, and where in the virtual supermarket they are, the site remembers we like these things and prompts us to place them in our basket.

If we are using a search engine for occasional queries, we start typing our query and are prompted by similar inputs we have entered previously – is this what we are searching for again?

As I Work From Home, I often use an internet bookstore to locate specific books I may need. I am prompted to let them know that it is me and not somebody else who is looking at their web site, then they advise me, as I search, what other customers who have made similar purchases also bought. So, they know who I am, what I have bought in the past and what other customers with similar tastes have also chosen. The Internet Business is certainly very complex!

When we search through sites, looking for information, perhaps in relation to something we have seen on tv, we may often see a counter on an internet site, advising how many individuals have visited this web page. They are monitoring traffic through their web page. Perhaps they want to know which pages are of most interest to other individuals, 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 many more Online Jobs and tasks we would have gone to the library to do before, or gone to the local high street with cash, we leave a trail which is easy 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.