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Chapter 4 Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems 167

deleted and can be installed whenever a person clicks on a Flash video. These
so-called “Local Shared Object” files are used by Flash to play videos and are put
on the user’s computer without their consent. Marketers use Web beacons as
another tool to monitor online behavior. Web beacons, also called Web bugs (or
simply “tracking files”), are tiny software programs that keep a record of users’
online clickstream and report this data back to whomever owns the tracking
file invisibly embedded in e-mail messages and Web pages that are designed to
monitor the behavior of the user visiting a Web site or sending e-mail. Web bea-
cons are placed on popular Web sites by third-party firms who pay the Web sites
a fee for access to their audience. So how common is Web tracking? In a path-
breaking series of articles in the Wall Street Journal in 2010 and 2011, research-
ers examined the tracking files on 50 of the most popular U.S Web sites. What
they found revealed a very widespread surveillance system. On the 50 sites,
they discovered 3,180 tracking files installed on visitor computers. Only one
site, Wikipedia, had no tracking files. Some popular sites such as Dictionary.
com, MSN, and Comcast, installed more than 100 tracking files! Two-thirds of
the tracking files came from 131 companies whose primary business is identify-
ing and tracking Internet users to create consumer profiles that can be sold to
advertising firms looking for specific types of customers. The biggest trackers
were Google, Microsoft, and Quantcast, all of whom are in the business of sell-
ing ads to advertising firms and marketers. A follow-up study in 2012 found the
situation had worsened: tracking on the 50 most popular sites had risen nearly
five fold! The cause: growth of online ad auctions where advertisers buy the
data about users’ Web browsing behavior.
Other spyware can secretly install itself on an Internet user’s computer by
piggybacking on larger applications. Once installed, the spyware calls out to
Web sites to send banner ads and other unsolicited material to the user, and
it can report the user’s movements on the Internet to other computers. More
information is available about intrusive software in Chapter 8.
About 75 percent of global Internet users use Google Search and other
Google services, making Google the world’s largest collector of online user data.
Whatever Google does with its data has an enormous impact on online privacy.
Most experts believe that Google possesses the largest collection of personal
information in the world—more data on more people than any government
agency. The nearest competitor is Facebook.
After Google acquired the advertising network DoubleClick in 2007, Google
has been using behavioral targeting to help it display more relevant ads based
on users’ search activities and to target individuals as they move from one
site to another in order to show them display or banner ads. Google allows
tracking software on its search pages, and using DoubleClick, it is able to track
users across the Internet. One of its programs enables advertisers to target ads
based on the search histories of Google users, along with any other informa-
tion the user submits to Google such as age, demographics, region, and other
Web activities (such as blogging). Google’s AdSense program enables Google to
help advertisers select keywords and design ads for various market segments
based on search histories, such as helping a clothing Web site create and test
ads targeted at teenage females. A recent study found that 88 percent of 400,000
Web sites had at least one Google tracking bug.
Google has also been scanning the contents of messages received by users
of its free Web-based e-mail service called Gmail. Ads that users see when they
read their e-mail are related to the subjects of these messages. Profiles are
developed on individual users based on the content in their e-mail. Google now

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