Third-Party Content

When you visit a Web site, typically two parties are involved: You are the first party, and the Web site you are visiting is the second party. But third parties can also be involved. For example, sometimes an ad appears as an image on the Web site. The ad could be coming directly from the Web site you know you are visiting, or it could be loading from another company's Web site. In this case, the technical details are simple. Consider this: The HTML code that creates the Web site uses links to find all the images it loads. Most of the links point to the Web site you know you are visiting. However, there are times when the link points to another organization's Web site. Whenever a Web site loads content such as images or sounds from a third-party site, you are no longer just visiting the Web site you intended to. Now you have been subjected to third-party content, which is just the same as if you had visited that third-party Web site directly.

Third-party content can come in many forms. It can be images or sounds loaded into your browser, or it might be other active content, such as ActiveX or Java. What you should be concerned about is cookies and Web bugs that come from third parties. We will discuss these more in the next few sections.

Let's illustrate this with an example: I am going to visit my favorite portal Web site, www.mifavorita.com. After I open www.mifavorita.com in my Web browser, I log in and begin my surfing activities. I am actually doing some camping next weekend and need a new sleeping bag. So, I type three keywords in the portal's search engine: buy sleeping bag. Hold it a minute; before I even click Submit on this search page, I am being monitored by a third-party Web site. Not just one…but two! I didn't realize that a Web bug had been loaded in my browser by www.bigmarketing.com or that a cookie had been set on my machine by www.bigads.com. Wow! And, worse still, after I click the Submit button for this search, both of these third-party Web sites will learn my three keywords. They'll learn them because my favorite portal Web site is sharing them.

I click Submit, and the search page ends up returning a bunch of results, with an ad from a famous online camping store. Well, I guess that's not so bad. But wait a minute; think back now—didn't I log in to this portal with a username and password? And isn't all that information correlated with the initial registration information I gave www.mifavorita.com when I signed up—things like my age, sex, occupation, and home address? Hmmm…is there anyway these third-party sites could have that information as well? If so, then they could easily correlate my search keywords with my profile. Then they could keep this information in a database and keep collecting over time. But it doesn't end there, either, because they are tracking my clicks through this portal—every Web page I visit, every link I click.

How did these third parties get so deep inside www.mifavorita.com? Well, I am upset to know that my favorite Web site actually let them! Not just that, but the Webmasters at www.mifavorita.com had to actually add the HTML code to the site themselves. Well, let me take another look at the privacy policy of www.mifavorita.com. It says that they keep my personal information secure and do not disclose it except under a few certain circumstances where I agree to it. But what's this? Oh, they do mention that www.bigmarketing.com and www.bigads.com are third parties to their site. The policy says that they use cookies and other tracking methods to monitor how the site is used and provide www.mifavorita.com with important feedback. Okay, wait; there is another sentence that says these third-party sites do not collect personal information about me, but rather just track aggregate information. Well, it is actually rare that a site will even tell you third-party monitoring is occurring, so…I feel better…I guess. This is how most of your Web surfing will be, unfortunately.