Advertiser Influence

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Advertiser Influence

Protect yourself from advertiser influence with a VPN
When it comes to advertisements on the internet, things have come a long way from flashing banners showing at the top of every page when you visit a website.

Many are now hugely sophisticated systems that track you across the internet from one site to the next, collecting as much information as possible about your surfing and shopping habits, in the hope to give you more advertisements that you click on or videos that you view.

Advertisers track and try to change your behaviours

The good news is that if you do not want to be tracked around the web with some of the world’s biggest corporations collecting and storing information on what you have bought, where you bought it and what else you have been looking at, a VPN is here to help you.

When you use a Virtual Private Network (VPN), the information you input to the net gets encrypted and you are given a different IP address from your own so companies cannot see what you are doing and cannot follow around the net.

Of course nothing is fool proof but a VPN is one of the best solutions at helping to stop companies tracking you around the internet, but you may be wondering why it is so important that you do that anyway.

On the face of it, companies seeing where you like to shop and what you like to buy and then showing you adverts for similar products and websites may seem like not too big an issue and maybe even something useful.

Whilst adverts are annoying for everybody, most understand that website need to feature adverts to make money as it costs a lot of time and money to keep even the most basic websites up and running and successful.

Where problems can occur is when companies take the information they gather and use it against you.

Sometimes that can be a simple as selling that data on so that you receive more and more spam. Whilst a pain, it is perhaps not too big of a worry, unless a scammer buys that data and users it to try and scam you out of your money, personnel data and more.

The biggest worry is perhaps the new trend of ‘Advertiser Influence’.

This is where companies take your data and not just show you products and services that are likely to have been at least of interest to you but they take your information and bombard you with other solutions.

Whilst this can perhaps be what they deem to be a better product or service, in reality it will be the company willing to pay them the most to advertise with them, but it can be companies trying to change your shopping and purchasing behaviour.

Whilst this may seem far fetch or something that will not happen to you as you not what you want and cannot be swayed, you just have to look at rise of this type of advertising from political parties across the globe where those parties to the right and far right are using what you do on the internet to find what is of interest to you and tying that into how they can help you with your issues.

In the same way companies can see that you like to buy product A and shop 1 and bombard you with adverts to convince you that product B is better and then what they have seen you looking for info on that new product they show you that you can buy it from shop 2.

Spam Bombarding

If you have spent any amount of time shopping online, you will likely have also spent some time doing research to try and find the product or service that is right for you.

Normally, you will figure out what is not right and then you will never look at them again before going to a shop selling the product or service that is right for you to buy it and again, then never really thinking twice.

Why would you, as you have no interest in the product/service that was wrong and you now have the one that is right, so you either have no interest in buying it again or if it is something that needs replacing, you know exactly where to get it.

Unfortunately whilst that may seem like common sense to us and to you, for an advertiser it simply does not matter.

The search engine or social media that you used to do your research will in all likelihood of tracked everything that you did and they will sell that info onto advertisers.

Of course, they only know what you were looking at and not what you thought of the products so if you are really unlucky and every company providing the product or service you were looking at, including the one you decided were of no use, will now know that you were interest in their product or service and they will know keep reminding you in the hope that then go onto not only buy their product or service but that you buy it from them.

Of course, you have already made your purchase and have no interest at all in what they have to offer but you will receive ads for it on many of the websites you visit, ads on search engines that you use and if you were unfortunate enough to use a social network you will now be bombarded in every way imaginable, including to your emails with some companies spamming your inbox.

Thankfully, it is easy to mask your ip and mask who you are and what you are looking at and therefore making it impossible to track you and spam you when you use one of the great VPN services that we feature on this website.

When you couple that with the other great security functions that a Virtual Private Network has and it really is a case that using a VPN is simply a must in the current era or us giving more and more information to companies that have reputation for not caring about their users and only ‘the almighty dollar’.

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