Defeating Behavioral Advertising with an Anonymous Proxy

Although the Internet has many uses these days, the most popular use of it has to be for online shopping. It seems that Ebay may have started the craze, but these online vendors have blown up since its advent. Amazon, Craigslist; they all are successful sites and are probably the most highly populated sites on the Internet today.

Although these places say they are all about the customer, one cannot sometimes always be fooled so. Many of these companies are coming out of the woodwork and coming into scandals regarding the privacy of their loyal consumer’s data.

When you sign up for these stores services and go to buy something, you are prompted to enter all sorts of data. At the time, it all seems to be for the good of expedited shipping, and other company related things. Even a credit card number is required, so that the seller may have access to his or her money.

Everybody is familiar with the stories of people getting swindled by false companies, or being tricked by an unreliable seller. This is not a big concern on the big selling sites, but there is another thing that is. They sell your private information to third party companies who then in turn try to sell you even more things.

These third party sites will pay a large sum of money for this data because they know that with data and browsing and buying histories, they will know your interests, and can market to you more effectively based on them. While this is helpful to the little sites because they make more money, and helpful to the big players because they get a cut of the money, it is bad for everyone’s privacy rights and status.

You don’t even have to be on one of these sites to get sold into (no pun intended) this technology. Programs called “behavioral advertisers” which are employed by your ISPs (Internet Service Providers) can, unbeknownst to you, search through your browsing history and find your interests; likes and dislikes. Once again, the behavioral advertisers profit from your sales, and the ISPs can take a small cut for releasing your information. It is a no-brainer for them, quick money for no work.

Unfortunately, this is often not even illegal. These buying websites often force you to give up many of your rights and privacy perks when you accept their terms of service agreements. The problem is, no one realizes this because everyone just blindly accepts the agreements without even a perusal over them. Every time you have to accept one of these agreements, always make sure to read it, or at least scan it for possible right surrendering that must be done. They usually aren’t worded in a confusing fashion, and it certainly won’t take a professional lawyer to understand what is going on.

Even though these rights are relinquished in the terms of service, it only takes one squeaky wheel to get something changed. If people were to complain to these sites, surely they would see change. In the meantime, be wary of these sites and if ads begin to pop up that you are actually interested in, someone could have just made a quick buck off of you.

One way to beat behavioral advertising is to use an anonymous proxy.  By using an anonymous proxy, your IP address changes so that the advertising program cannot tie your different Internet browsing sessions together to get a complete picture of your activities.  The key in using an anonymous proxy to avoid this tracking is to use one that has multiple server locations and multiple IP addresses.

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