Holiday shopping can be an exhausting experience, even online. There are so many places to visit and choices to make. You like to believe that the product and service recommendations you receive while shopping are helping show you the best bargains and important special offers. This is the claim made by many behavioral tracking advertisers. Their PhD-designed computer algorithms watch your every move and help predict what you might want to see.
But what happens when one of these friendly helpers has an ulterior motive such as selling your information to someone else or using it to invade your shopping privacy? These five tips will help ensure that you get the most from your holiday shopping experience and keep the unwanted intruders at bay.
1. Beware of upsells and add-on
It is common practice to offer additional related items to a customer who just completed a purchase. If you purchased a pair of shoes, it is logical for marketers to assume that you might want socks or even another pair of shoes. How you deal with these prompts tells the vendor a lot about your tendencies and preferences. Most importantly, it tells them that you DO or DO NOT respond to such advertisements. Vendors design their sites and shopping carts based on this behavior. If you ignore such prompts, or quickly navigate away from the site after receiving your purchase confirmation, you will be less likely to become a statistic and more likely to keep your personal privacy intact.
2. Use a different email address
One of the biggest annoyances surrounding online shopping is the increase in follow-up emails that are sent after you make your purchase. Good marketers know that existing customers are their best customers, so almost every purchase you make online will result in a series of emails designed to get you back to the site to buy something else. Most sites assume that by making a purchase from them, you have voluntarily "opted in" to their email marketing campaigns. But don’t forget that you can opt-out by clicking on each email’s unsubscribe link, while this sounds easy enough, it can sometimes be a time-consuming, painful process. Instead, go to gmail.google.com and get a new gmail email address that you can use exclusively for online shopping. Make sure to create a legitimate email address because some purchases will require you to validate it. Once you finish holiday shopping, you can then choose to either ignore or cancel that gmail account, and your 'real' email inbox will remain spam-free.
3. Read and understand the privacy policy
Every reputable vendor selling products online posts a privacy policy explaining what they do with the information they collect from their customers. For example, www.myshape.com is a women’s shopping site that suggests clothes that will fit a woman’s particular shape. To accomplish this task, they must collect personal details, such as body measurements, which would be of huge value to third parties who could use that data for marketing purposes. For example, a plus-size fashion company could pay for access to those measurements to target advertisements to individuals who fit their target demographic. But, reading the MyShape privacy policy we find this very clear statement:
“We never sell or trade email addresses with other companies without your expressed consent. Additionally, no personal information gathered via the MyShape registration process will be sold or shared with any third party.”
There is no ambiguity here; it is clear that your information is safe with them. During your holiday shopping, take a moment to review each site’s privacy policy before making a purchase, and look for similar statements. If a site does not have a privacy policy, or does not make it explicitly clear that they do not under any circumstances share your information, your privacy may be at risk.
4. Manage your time wisely
Holiday shopping for friends and family can be an exhilarating experience, but as the holidays get closer, online marketers ramp up their efforts to get you to spend on extras. For those who enjoy online shopping it can be easy to spend hours looking for the perfect gift. But it is important to remember that the longer you spend on a site, the more pages you click through and the more items you ask for details on, the more you are revealing about yourself to the vendor. This information is then fed to advertisers who will infiltrate your web browsing experience for the next several months. Once the cycle of targeted marketing begins, it can be difficult to stop. If you are concerned about what information you are providing to a vendor and his ad network, try to limit the time you spend on their site to greatly reduce the risk of privacy loss.
5. Be wary of social shopping
A hot new trend in social network marketing is the sharing of your purchases along with the prices that you paid for those items. Marketers tout this practice as having the benefit of letting your friends know where to find bargains, but they are really only interested in spawning additional sales. Sites like blippy.com connect directly to your iTunes and other social network accounts, automatically sharing your purchases with friends. Other sites like amazon.com offer customer reviews so you can share your opinion on books, vacuums or any of the other items that you purchased from them, providing feedback to other potential customers. Yelp.com allows customer reviews that can help promote businesses, or sometimes severely damage a vendor’s reputation. Before jumping into these systems and participating in the process, it is important to think through the extent of your engagement with them, especially in regards to your shopping tendencies. Once the “Web” knows what you purchased, how much you paid for it and how often you shop, you are likely to become a target for future advertising campaigns. While these social tools are not necessarily dangerous, your personal privacy will be much safer should you choose to ignore them. If you do choose to participate in them, at least consider doing so anonymously.
This holiday season, while browsing the electronic aisles of your favorite online retailers, remember these precautionary steps. There is no reason to fear behavioral tracking, just be aware and be in control.
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