Analysis of a user's behaviour may be used to provide content that enables the operator to infer their preferences and may be of interest to various parties, such as advertisers.
[13] Restrictions on third-party cookies introduced by web browsers are bypassed by some tracking companies using a technique called CNAME cloaking [de], where a third-party tracking service is assigned a DNS record in the first-party origin domain (usually CNAME) so that it's masqueraded as first-party even though it's a separate entity in legal and organizational terms.
In July 2011, Ashkan Soltani and a team of researchers at UC Berkeley reported that a number of websites, including Hulu, were using ETags for tracking purposes.
[33] Use of web tracking can be controversial when applied in the context of a private individual; and to varying degrees is subject to legislation such as the EU's eCommerce Directive and the UK's Data Protection Act.
In a business-to-business context, understanding a visitor's behavior in order to identify buying intentions is seen by many commercial organizations as an effective way to target marketing activities.
[34] Visiting companies can be approached, both online and offline, with marketing and sales propositions which are relevant to their current requirements.
From the point of view of a sales organization, engaging with a potential customer when they are actively looking to buy can produce savings in otherwise wasted marketing funds.
Contrary to popular belief, browser privacy mode does not prevent (all) tracking attempts because it usually only blocks the storage of information on the visitor site (cookies).
Examples of such search engines include DuckDuckGo, MetaGer, and Swiscows, which prioritize preventing the storage and tracking of user activity.
It's worth noting that while these alternatives offer enhanced privacy, some may not guarantee complete anonymity, and a few might be less user-friendly compared to mainstream search engines such as Google and Microsoft Bing.