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经常上网的人可能都遇到过这样的情况：浏览网页时总是跳出一些广告，内容还都是你最近想买的商品。别误会，你的电脑还没智能到读懂你的想法——是你的个人隐私被出卖啦！

When you’re surfing the Internet on your laptop from your dorm or home, do you know your personal details are being gathered secretly? And would you be surprised to know the information may be sold cheaply to advertisers and marketers?

According to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal, all it takes is a tiny file in a computer—a single code consisting of a long series of numbers and letters—to record the computer user’s age, gender, location, favorite movies and hobbies.

The newspaper reports that Lotame Solutions Inc., a New York company, uses sophisticated software called “beacon” to capture what people are typing on a website. Lotame packages that data into profiles about individuals, only without their names, and sells the profiles to companies seeking customers. Batches of such data may be sold for a few dollars.

The Wall Street Journal probe discovered that spying on Internet users is one of the fastest-growing businesses on the World Wide Web now. Today, tracking consumers is far more intrusive than the public realizes. For example, the top 50 websites in the US on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning.

The “cookie”—a tiny text file put on your PC by websites or marketing firms which might be used to remember your preferences for one site, or to track you across many sites—is already old news. There are new and more complex tools such as “beacon” which scan in real time what people are doing on a webpage. These beacons instantly assess the Internet user’s location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions, and so on.

Tracking files get onto websites and are downloaded to a computer, in several ways. Often, companies simply pay sites to distribute their tracking files. But tracking companies sometimes hide their files within free software offered to websites, or hide them within other tracking files or ads. When this happens, websites aren’t always aware that they’re installing the files on visitors’ computers.

Tracking companies are often staffed by math gurus with expertise in quantitative analysis. Some use probability algorithms to try to pair what they know about a person’s online behavior with data from offline sources about household income, geography and education.

Personal data gathered from such tracking is now bought and sold on stock market—like exchanges.