Google Is Top Tracker of Surfers in Study [NYT Bits Blog]
Are you concerned about your privacy as you surf the web? Ever wonder what the business model is behind those searches you perform for free at your favorite websites? Many Internet users share the same questions about how web sites that collect data about their surfing habits and patterns through the use of tracking cookies. A new research study conducted by graduate students at the University of California at Berkley provides ample evidence that the majority of the most popular sites on the web use one or both of two Google technologies to keep track of the users surfing those sites.
Google's Analytics is a free product that gathers statistics about the users surfing to a particular site for the use of the site's owners. Of the top 100 sites on the web, the University of California study revealed that 81 percent of them used Google Analytics cookies to track users to those sites. DoubleClick, a web advertising company acquired by Google, had a presence on 70 of those same sites. The service uses cookies to serve up its ads. Combining the number of sites that used one or the other, the study found that 92 of the top 100 sites used a Google service's cookies.
The study also looked at a broader range of web sites. Using a sample of nearly 400,000 web domains, the students conducting the study discovered that 88 percent of those domains used some Google service that gathered information about the users visiting those sites.
For it's part, Google maintains that both services serve a legitimate commercial purpose and while they are used on individual sites, Google does not aggregate the data that these tools yield across all the sites that employ their data gathering technology. So, even though one site may be gathering data about you when it uses a Google service to serve up an advertisement, that doesn't mean other sites have access to that same information because Google doesn't maintain a central repository for the data.
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