Many people who have personal Web pages are unknowingly tracking people who visit and sending the information to third parties, according to a new report.
The report -- released yesterday by Cyveillance, which tracks Internet sites for corporate clients -- says that the use of an Internet monitoring technology popularly known as "Web bugs" has exploded on personal Web pages, especially those created free through online companies like America Online and Geocities, a company owned by Yahoo. The monitoring technology, which can be used to gather information on visitors to a Web site, is invisibly added to the Web pages as part of elements that the sites offer to help create the Web page.
America Online, for example, encourages users to place an advertisement offering a free trial membership; the company promises to pay users US$50 for any new America Online member who signs up for the service by clicking on the ad.
When users place the AOL ad on their pages, they also get a Web bug that passes information along to Be Free Inc, an Internet market research and advertising company.
The Web bug technology, which is also known by such terms as "clear gifs" and "Web beacons," now appears on 18 percent of personal pages, compared with less than 4 percent of pages overall and 16 percent of home pages for major companies. In a similar survey that Cyveillance conducted in 1998, fewer than 0.5 percent of personal Web pages contained Web bugs.
"The increase was so large on personal pages we went back to check it, because we thought it must be a mistake,'' said Brian Murray, the author of the report.
The privacy policy of Yahoo states that the company sometimes uses Web bugs, but does not say explicitly that it places them on personal pages of its users. The America Online privacy policy does not describe the use of Web bugs on personal pages.
Often invisible, Web bugs are generally innocuous: they are often used, for example, to count visitors to sites or to gather statistical information about Web sites without collecting any personal information about those visitors.
Andrew Weinstein, a spokesman for America Online, said that its Web bugs collect no personally identifiable information on the visitors to personal pages, and had a single purpose: ``to send checks to people'' whose Web pages attract new customers to the company.
But privacy advocates find the potential of such bugs alarming. Scott Charney, an Internet privacy and security expert at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, said that he had seen an early draft of the Cyveillance survey, and that if Web bugs were in fact being used without consumers' knowledge to gather information, "it's extremely troubling -- the technology should not be used to collect information in such a covert way."
The use of bugs to track people and to create profiles of them becomes more powerful -- and, some privacy advocates argue, more problematic -- when the technology is used by a network of sites linked to some third party.
The bugs are often placed on pages by third parties, such as online advertising agencies, to collect data about visitors to pages of the agencies' clients and to help the advertising company to determine which banner ads the visitors should see.
By sharing information among Web bugs across several different sites, the bug can also be used to track people's movements as they wander across the Internet. And if the visitor has given personal information to one site, say by registering for contests or signing a visitor's log, then the information can be linked to his or her activities on any other site with a Web bug issued by the same third party.
Cyveillance, which is based in Arlington, Virginia, conducted the survey, which included a million Web pages, to determine how prevalent these bugs have become; since the company works with clients to safeguard their reputations in the online world.
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