To celebrate their first meeting of the year and to encourage new members to attend, Sophie and Aileen ask Tania, the community center advisor, if they can order pizza for the group. She agrees and tells Aileen and Sophie that she will research a local pizza delivery service. Ideally, she wants to find a restaurant that also offers a multiple-pie discount. The club is expecting a lot of new members and they need to be mindful of the cost since the community center has a limited budget.
Tania pulls out her phone and searches for restaurants that offer local pizza delivery. In the search results, her favorite pizza restaurant, Pizza Digs, pops up. Antonio tells Tania about the online ad he saw for a Finding Alyssa promotional discount called Finding A Pizza.
She says, “Great, how do I find that ad?” Antonio says, “Enter a search for local pizza delivery, and you’ll see it.” She tries that, but unfortunately, she doesn’t see it.
Search
Below are Tania's search results without logging in.
Information
If you use a website or app without being logged in, the service can still collect information about you. Your location can be deduced from the IP address your browser included in its request, along with the kind of computer and operating system you’re running.
Cookies
Your browser can also store cookies—small chunks of data associated with individual sites. Cookies are one way that search data can be personalized, even if you aren’t logged in.
Antonio goes back to the computer lab, and when he searches for local pizza delivery, he sees the ad in the sidebar of the search results. This is because the search engine remembered his earlier searches for Finding Alyssa.
Antonio texts Tania the URL for the online discount code. When Tania taps the URL on her phone, she is taken to an app download page for a new delivery app that Pizza Digs is exclusively partnered with. She downloads the app, opens it, and searches for Pizza Digs within the app. She adds four plain cheese pies and a few liters of soda to her cart.
Creating an Account
Explore the information you provide and steps usually taken when you register for an account
In order to provide you with a greater amount of personalization, websites and apps may ask you to register, or create a new account.
When you register, you often provide information that personally identifies you, such as your name and address, birthdate, and perhaps even some of your medical or financial data, depending on the nature of the service.
When you register, you often provide information that personally identifies you, such as your name and address, birthdate, and perhaps even some of your medical or financial data, depending on the nature of the service.
Once you’re registered, a service may associate your profile with information that’s already stored in cookies on your local machine.
This means that anything you did before you were known to the website can now be linked to you.
This can potentially have a harmful impact, linking your previously anonymous online behavior to you in ways that you didn’t intend or anticipate.
The app requires that Tania enter her email address and create a password. It also requires her to click through the user agreement and enter some personal information including her address, phone number, and credit card information.
The app also requests permission to access Tania's photos and her location while using the app. She asks Aileen, “Why would a food delivery app request access to my photos?” Aileen replies, “I don’t know. Maybe you should tap Don’t allow.”
Passwords
Learn more about passwords.
Most services require you to choose a strong password when you sign up. This means choosing a password that’s not easy to guess, like your pet’s name, or a simple word or numeric pattern.
A strong password shouldn’t be too short, and it should have a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. The longer and more complex the password, the harder it will be for a program to guess it by trying all of the possible combinations of characters.
It can be helpful to use the term “passphrase” instead of “password.” Create a sentence that relates uniquely to you, then include capitalization, punctuation (including spaces between the words), and numbers. You’ll make something that’s very hard to guess, but easy for you to remember.
You shouldn’t reuse the same password on multiple sites, either. If one becomes compromised, then all your personal data is at risk. If you use a password manager, you can create and keep track of unique, complex passwords for each of the sites you log into.
A password manager can generate very strong random passwords automatically, and it can fill those passwords automatically on the sites you visit. You’ll need to lock the password manager, too—which is where you’ll use one very strong passphrase so that nobody can steal all the keys to your personal identity.
Tracking
See the background information gathered from you previous browsing history.
Websites can combine information you have provided to them willingly with information they can gather about your use of the site, such as what you click on or how long you spend looking at a given page. They may also take note of your physical location based on your IP address.
Together with your browsing history and other information stored on your computer, websites can form insights and make inferences about an individual by aggregating all of this information. Information that one site knows about you may also be shared with other websites.
This might be used to generate ads for events that are similar to events you have attended, or promotions for items you have previously searched for online.
When websites collect data about your online activity, it is often used in ways that make your online experience smoother or more convenient. For example, a website might show you a list of the last five items you looked at, or allow you to resume watching a movie right where you left off. It can also autofill your shipping and billing information to simplify making online purchases.
Finally, Tania is taken to the last page and clicks “Order it,” and the order is complete. It will be delivered on the day of the party. Tania's glad she placed her order in advance in case the restaurant is busy that day. After she's placed the order, the app sends her notifications updating her on her order’s status. It looks like the pizzas will be delivered right on time for the first TV Club meeting of the year!
