The Dangers of 'Accept All'

The most pertinent cause for privacy concern is Third Party Cookies. These trackers are set by “partnered advertising companies, analyticscompanies, and companies that monitor user behavior over time”, allowingadvertisers to gather data across multiple sessions, sites,and devices. Subsequently, advertisers profit from this data by selling it to Data Brokers, who leverage publicly available information (e.g. age, demographics) and transaction histories (acquired from partnering companies) of the web user to assign this individual to a segment. They then sell these ‘segments’, groups of people who exhibit similar characteristics or behaviors, back to advertisers and marketing departments for enhanced targeting. ‘Department Store Moms’ and ‘Married Women and Children who have previously bought Men’s Accessories’ are only two of the segments curated by Acxiom, a leading Data broker, for their ‘Father’s Day Package’. These segments are additionally distributed to a variety of undisclosed entities including but not limited to U.S. and foreign governments.

Consider a web user, Anna, who visits the Babies R’ Us website. Given this information, collected using a first party cookie, an advertiser might classify Anna as an expectant mother or a guest at someone’s baby shower. Consequently, Anna is bombarded with advertisements for baby clothes and gifts, which she might find relevant, or even helpful. Now suppose that this website places a third-party cookie on Anna’s browser that tracks her activity across several websites in the session, eventually learning that she subsequently visited Planned Parenthood, A College Prep and Study Website, and Baby Gap. This browsing data changes hands as described above, and is later combined with public records containing Anna’s age, race, and zip code, ultimately leading to her segmentation as a ‘Teenage High-School Mom.’