Customer loyalty in traditional commerce has always been one of the most important tasks of every merchant. Winning a customer costs a lot compared to how easy it is to lose them. Unlike the purchases we can make online, a traditional merchant never looks for us to come back, trust their good work.
When we search for any product through the internet, we access a large number of news, social media, stores ... websites that use cookies for more than what they were initially created for, a disturbing situation from any point of view. view.
Despite the European directive that obliges websites to inform all users who visit web pages about what types of data are stored by the cookies they create on our computer each time we visit them, very few people care to read carefully the terms.
If you want to know which are the websites that include the greatest number of third-party trackers, then we show you the web pages that more information obtained from our visits, information that is later used, in most cases, to guide advertising.
The best way to avoid the continuous tracking to which we are subjected at all times, the best we can do is invest in a reliable VPN service, a quality VPN that provides us with the anonymity and necessary encryption when browsing without leaving traces.
1- Accuweather
Accuweather is one of the largest and oldest meteorological information companies in the United States, it was created in 1962. This company not only provides us with practically real-time weather information, but has also become on its own merits in the main violator of internet privacy, as shown by different studies.
The weather information is one of the most curiosity / need generated, so practically daily, and probably several times a day, users make use of your website, becoming a gold mine for advertisers Who to geographically target your ads. Acuwetahter sells the data it collects wholesale to third-party companies, and offers them updated information to know where users are at all times.
Accuweather uses Nexage to manage cookies, a company that is part of Oath, and which in turn uses this data through an advertising network known as AdMax, thus reaching thousands of advertisers. The next time you want to know the weather, if you can avoid both the website like the application, better than better, since they are storing confidential data that they later sell to third parties.
2- eBay
eBay, with more than 180 million worldwide, is a constant stream of consumer information. Every search we do on eBay is stored in the form of cookies on our computer. The arrival of Amazon forced the company to try to get the most out of its users, to monetize them not only through sales.
eBay is full of associated tracking cookies both to Google and to Yahoo and Facebook, which use the DoubleClick advertising platform in order to offer personalized ads based on the searches we have made on the platform.
To collect analytical data that allows them to know the preferences of their users, eBay uses a set of tools called Scorecard Research Beacon in order to extract the maximum possible amount of information from each visit.
3-BBC
The BBC is the public television of the United Kingdom, and like other countries such as Spain, public television does not offer any type of advertising. The BBC website, where all the content that is broadcast on this channel is available on demand as if it were a streaming video service.
The BBC does not show any form of advertising to visitors to its UK website, but yes to international visitors, ads shown through multiple trackers. The latest analysis of the BBC website has up to 19 ad trackers, with the majority being third parties.
4-Amazon
It is striking not to have found the e-commerce giant topping this ranking as most would expect. The world's largest online retailer It is one of the websites with the highest number of third-party trackers. Amazon uses a large number of ad networks including Advertising.com and BidSwitch.
But there is much more. Thanks to the «walled garden» structure, which covers about 40% of the United States online retailer, Amazon's tracking efforts are conducted internally, using visitors as lab rats to refine your marketing systems.
Each part of the Amazon website extracts information from users, including the main sales platform, Kinde, Prime and Amazon Fire (not to mention Amazon Echo and Alexa). If we combine this information with third-party trackers we find a surveillance and analysis mechanism similar to the one in many countries.
Should we assume that all websites are tracking information?
In short: yes. These are the four most prominent websites for the use of third-party tracking tools, but they are not the only thing. The Russian giant Mail.Ru, Reddit, WordPress and Google with other examples of websites that integrate third-party trackers. We are in the information age and information is power. How to obtain this information? Through free services.
If a business offers services for free, whether it's Google or Reddit, tracking is inevitable. The same applies to ads (eBay) or why customers make purchasing decisions (like Amazon does). If you think or trust completely, you are not being tracked, you are fooling yourself.
Thanks to VPN services it is possible to partially hide part of our information, but not all, since it is practically impossible to erase our footprint every time we navigate. If you are concerned about the surveillance and the theft of private data to which we are continually subjected, using a VPN is the only solution.