How does Alexa.com gather statistics on its web site's users.

Discussion in 'privacy problems' started by DesuMaiden, Sep 6, 2013.

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  1. DesuMaiden

    DesuMaiden Registered Member

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    They rank sites based on their popularity. And they also have demographic statistics on the age range, education level and gender of a site's visitors. What techniques do they use to gather all of this information? The amount of demographic information Alexa.com is able to gather is shocking and a potential danger to privacy, because it proves how powerful Google's data mining and personal profiling is. If you care about privacy, you better increase your security.
     
    DesuMaiden, Sep 6, 2013
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  2. LowWaterMark

    LowWaterMark Administrator

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    How it works is described on their site:

    http://www.alexa.com/help/traffic-learn-more

    Their main tool is the Alexa toolbar which has features that some people like, so, they install it and use it regularly. That toolbar records traffic dynamics across their millions of users, and they then use statisitics to calculate website usage and popularity. It's much like how television ratings are figured... sample sets of people from different "walks of life" participate, and their TV viewing is extrapolated to the whole population via statistics.

    Anyway, like google analytics, Alexa data is more about and for the use of websites, not about the individual users. It's the "trends" that they are trying to figure out.
     
    LowWaterMark, Sep 6, 2013
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  3. DesuMaiden

    DesuMaiden Registered Member

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    Thanks for the explanation.
     
    DesuMaiden, Sep 15, 2013
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