How the site is tracking you

Some monitoring methods are easy to think of, for example, when you log on to the site, it will know who you are. But how do these network monitoring systems record your personal information through your online behavior?

The advertising system often establishes the user information base by tracking the user's behavior to locate who is the target customer. If you've ever visited a commercial website, and soon after you've seen the commercials on other sites, the ad system may already be working.

IP Address

The IP address is the most basic way to confirm the identity of the user. Now, at home or in the office, your computer is likely to share the same IP address as your other network devices. From your IP address, the site can roughly determine your geographic location-not yet accurate to the street, but generally confirm your city or area. You may have seen those window ads to disguise yourself by showing your location, and that's what the ad system does. IP addresses can change and can be shared by other users, so it's not a good way to track individual users. However, IP can be combined with the other technologies described in this article to determine your geographic location.

HTTP referrer

When you click on a link, your browser loads the page and tells the site where you came from. For example, you clicked on a link to an external site on a how-to geek site, and the site will know which article you clicked in from How-to geek. This information is stored in the HTTP referrer message header. When you download the contents of the current page, the HTTP referrer will also be sent. For example, if a website has ads or tracking scripts, your browser will tell The Advertiser or the Network Monitoring system which page you are browsing! The so-called "web bug" is a small, invisible picture of a single pixel that uses HTTP referrer to secretly monitor you. They are also used to monitor the messages you open, provided your mail client downloads the pictures.

Cookies and Tracking scripts

Cookies are pieces of information that a Web site can store on your browser. It has many legitimate uses-for example, when you log in to your Internet bank, cookies can record your login information. When you change the settings for a Web site, the cookie will also record it so that your settings will be available throughout the course of your browsing.

Cookies can also be used to identify and record your behavior on a website. There's no big problem--the site may want to know what pages you're browsing, so it knows what you're experiencing. And the real danger is those third party cookies.

While Third-party cookies have some legitimate uses, they are often used by advertising systems to monitor your behavior on different sites. Many sites-not most sites will have third-party ads and surveillance scripts. If two different sites have the same advertising or surveillance system, the browsing history of the two sites in your browser can be tracked together and analyzed. The scripts from social networking sites also have the ability to track. For example, if you log on to Facebook and then you browse to another site that has the "like" button on Facebook, then Facebook will know that you are browsing the site. Facebook keeps a cookie to record your login status, so the Like button (which is part of the script) will know who you are.

Super Cookies

You can empty your cookies--, actually. However, the trick to empty cookies has not worked--"super cookies" are on the rise. An example of a super cookie is Evercookie. Super cookies such as Evercookie will place cookie data in different places-for example, Flash cookie,silverlight storage, browser history, or HTML5 local storage. A very smart way to record users is that each time a user logs on to a website, the site is recorded in a very small picture to record a unique color. These images will be stored in the user's browser cache, so that this color can be used to identify the user.

When the site finds that you have removed the super cookie in some places, it uses the data stored elsewhere to recover the information. For example, you may have erased the cookies from the browser, but you did not clear the cookies in Flash, so this site will copy the cookie information in Flash to your browser cookies. In this way, the super Cookie's vitality is very strong.

User Agent

Every time your browser links to a page, it sends the user agent information to the Web site. This information includes your browser's information and operating system information, which is stored and used by the ad system to analyze how to advertise.

Browser fingerprint

Each browser actually has its own characteristics. Web sites can detect your operating system type, browser version, installed browser plug-ins and their versions, operating system screen resolution, downloaded fonts, time zone, and other information. See, even if you disable the browser cookie, there is other information to identify your browser.

A website called Panopticlick can tell you how this information is used. In fact, in 1.1 million people, there will be a person's browser and you have the same settings.

Of course, there must be other tracking techniques. There's a lot of money spent on this technology every year, and a lot of people are racking their brains every day to come up with a new recruit. The appearance of your--evercookie is evidence.