When we visit a website or use an app, small pieces of data (cookies) are placed on our device to track and record what we do. Some cookies are functional – for example, they remember your username and password. Other cookies help the company analyse its users and make services more profitable.
There are also ‘third party cookies’ – these are used to sell our data to companies who want to advertise their products to us. Did you know that Spotify lets over 60 companies place cookies on your device, including Google, Amazon, Snapchat and Facebook? In this way, companies can track us even when we don’t use their services.
So how can our data be used? Our data can be copied, analysed, stored, combined with other data, shared and sold to others – advertisers, companies, government. Some of the companies who track us are ‘data brokers’ – their business is to buy and sell data. Data brokers collect data from different sites and then ‘profile’ individual users – they put each of us into groups with other people like us. Then companies can work out things about us that we haven’t shared.