Go Incognito, Ye Online Shoppers!

Online shoppers show a variety of shopping behaviors.  One may enjoy window-shopping in a department store or one may love strolling in a mall with the objective of spending time all by oneself or with family for sheer relaxation. Likewise online customers too enjoy browsing retail sites often, just to understand trends or to know about the latest products or service innovations and introductions. Often while browsing we are bombarded with information and recommendations continuously based on our browsing history. Even as we open our emails and begin to focus on them, information from various online service providers would pop up distracting our attention, through the cookies stored in cache memory. One is awed many a time about how this tracking machinery could consistently do the job! Offline retailers tend to forget their regular customers, as people’s memories are short-lived. Even customer relationship programmes do not have an efficient process to alert the presence of regular customers in the store premises as they seldom deploy any reliable system to know repeat visits of customers, despite having a track of purchase histories.  

Quite a few technology geeks who are employed with marketing organizations, eagerly exercise their capabilities to do online snooping and search engine indexing. They attempt to closely track customers’ browsing and search behavior and successfully direct them to their own websites and offers. The intelligence system of online retailers is mind- blowing. No one can hide from the tracking of information when they are determined to snoop on customers’ browsing and purchase behavior. It is a man-eat-man world out there in the cyber space to grab customers from one another. Search engine indexing is found to help a great deal in the matter of collecting, analyzing and storing data for use by the search engine. The search engine index is the location where the collected data is securitized. Technical experts in competing online marketing organizations would work overtime to outsmart each other in designing the most efficient search engine indexing so that their product or service would get precedence and priority over the other in showing up first in the order of search results. Often such competitors pip each other at the post!  What may appear first in search results may also stand the chance of gaining the customer view first. Thus search engine indexing is said to precisely help overcome competition on searches made. The adequacy of the search is dependent on a properly designed search engine index with a plethora mix of key words and linked content, so that information is picked instantly to show on the results page first. Search engine spiders or crawlers, as technologists call them, are said to be deployed to go all around the web universe to enable the search engine index update information in a jiffy. 

Technology experts recommend online shoppers and browsers to go through the privacy options built into the software, including the operating system, which as customers we may have ignored so far. The safest way for organizations is to connect to the Internet through a Virtual Private Network (VPN). The VPN helps securitize information from any kind of snooping consequent to adopting the order of encrypting and decrypting of information, rendering it unreadable by snoopers. Individuals who would shop and browse online and want to be free from the botheration of advertisement pop-up, alerts and suggestions during unwanted occasions, can browse and shop from the privacy of their space by using the ‘go incognito’ mode in the browsers. Though it may not ensure a snooper free browsing experience, it may give relief to the browser from the information storage and the consequent pop-up troubles caused through cookies stored in cache memories! Most of us may have been unaware of the knack of escaping from cookies while browsing! 

So, isn’t it high time we went incognito while browsing?!

- Dr. Gibson G. Vedamani