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Most users access the internet through an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that maintains a record of every webpage that you access, every newsgroup you choose, and every email address you send and receive mail from. This clickstream information is held by the ISP, and although it may expire after a certain length of time, companies have no incentive to create cookies with a short lifespan.
On-line Storefronts and Malls:
These websites collect information on income-level, race, social class, hometown, identification, and behavior.
Internet Presence and Incentive Sites:
These websites establish a brand image, and "pull users to a commercial site behind it." The identify the page from which the user came so that a commercial site can know which advertisements are working.
Active Tracking:
A company called Newshare has a product called Clickshare that has very powerful information-gathering and reporting capabilities. When a business registers to become a Clickshare site, users that choose this site as their home website are solicited to give a large amount of personal information. This information is stored in the homesite's database. Log-in functionality helps the homesite recognize a user, regardless of cookies, and easily recall this personal information to associate with a user's actions.
Clickshare may track a user's movement between all Clickshare-registered sites. Clickshare may combine the demographic information from the homesite with it's clickstream information to produce reports about individual users, unbeknownst to them.
A product called Sitetrack is an addition to a Netscape server that allows it to track users and creates a "shell" around the server that serves to dynamically manipulate the presentation of webpages based on a particular user's behavior.
http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/6095/student-papers/fall95-papers/florey-privacy.html
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