It is hard to define privacy in today’s world. What is really private? What information does a website collect about you when you visit it? Are you taking part in “market research” without really knowing about it?
People share an awful amount of stuff online. All this data on Facebook, Twitter to blogs and forums reveal something unique about you as a person. As we spent an increasingly higher amount of time online surfing, loads of data is being collected. Whether that collected data is being sold to third parties, you don’t really know until you read the fine print (if you can find it).
As a marketer, I felt obligated to share some information so you know what is really happening when you visit a website. This hopefully should not scare you if you are already on Facebook or Twitter or Amazon or all of them. For example, a website can have StatCounter installed on its site. StatCounter as it states on its title is a Free Invisible Web Tracker, Hit Counter and Web Stats.
Having StatCounter installed on a site will reveal these information:
Page loads, Unique Visits, First time Visits, Returning Visits. You can get more detailed information through tabs such as Entry Pages, Exit Pages, Keyword Analysis, Visit Length, Recent Visitor Activity, Browsers etc.