The Internet’s popularity has led to an increase in tracking technologies. Website tracking is common, and employers and parents use software to monitor Internet usage. Copyright owners track visitors to peer-to-peer download sites, and cybercriminals track users to serve ads and steal information. Internet service providers monitor bandwidth usage, and subscribers often install software to monitor their usage.
The increase in the use and popularity of the Internet has led to a corresponding increase in tracking technologies. Parents can monitor their children’s web usage, employers can track where their employees spend their time online, and website owners can see how many visitors their sites are attracting and where they are coming from. among other things. Internet service providers can monitor the amount of bandwidth their customers use, and copyright owners regularly monitor and identify people sharing protected works online. Monitoring the Internet for these and other purposes has become relatively commonplace, and there are as many methods to monitor as there are reasons to monitor in the first place.
Tracking which individual websites a user accesses is one of the most common methods of Internet monitoring. Website tracking is usually accomplished with a software program installed on a network or personal computer. The program will keep a cache, or log, of all sites visited in each browsing session. Most of the time, this tracking goes completely unnoticed and doesn’t interfere with the user experience at all.
Employers commonly use software-based tools to monitor the Internet in their workplaces. Monitoring allows companies to monitor where employees spend their time and keep tabs on whether employees are accessing inappropriate or illegal content from work computers. Parents often use similar Internet monitoring software on home computers to identify all the sites their children have accessed. More often than not, tracking software can also be set up to block access to certain sites. This is useful for parents who want to prevent young children from coming across graphic content online, as well as employers who want to keep their employees off human-oriented sites like email and social networks during the workday.
However, not all tracking is done locally. Many Internet monitoring methods focus on identifying website visitors, which is usually done at the site level. A website owner can install tracking devices on the website itself that will monitor the number of visitors, the origin of those visitors and where the visitors went next, all without installing anything on the visitor’s computer. Most of the time, site traffic tracking is achieved by tracking Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.
When a computer connects to the Internet, it is assigned a unique IP address. The IP address identifies your computer by geographic location and Internet service provider, but never by name. In order to know the identity of the owners of the IP addresses, it is usually necessary to file a court order with the relevant Internet service provider.
Copyright owners often track visitors to different peer-to-peer download sites, monitoring data exchanges for protected files. Most movie and song files are protected by international copyrights and sharing them online without permission is illegal in many places. Content owners who can track which IP addresses are linked to alleged illegal downloads often use that information to prosecute people for copyright infringement.
However, not all Internet tracking is legitimate. Cybercriminals and spyware operators often track web users’ movements online to serve advertisements, steal passwords, and create identity profiles. Much of this type of tracking occurs through cookies, which are small packets of information downloaded surreptitiously to users’ computers.
Internet monitoring can also be used as a means of tracking Internet usage. Internet service providers typically set limits on the amount of bandwidth subscribers can use in any given month without paying fees for the excess. Providers determine which users have switched by monitoring bandwidth usage over time. To avoid penalties, individual subscribers often install software-based meters to monitor the Internet bandwidth they have used.
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