To be clear, a url or uniform resource locator is also known as the unique address of the website resource you are visiting.

Every piece of content on the internet has a url.

For example the web page https://www.aloyeinvestigation.com itself is a url

And so is the picture on it which is located at https://www.aloyeinvestigation.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Cardinal.jpg

Every website you access deposits a cookie file on your computer as well.

That’s how the internet works.

A cookie file from https://www.aloyeinvestigation.com might have 30 or more urls listing every item your web browser has loaded from my website.

Your internet browser’s cache will then use the cookies to determine when to reload stale content, how to handle logging in and authenticating if you use a password or account to access anything, and a whole range of other things rely on cookies for successful facilitation.

That’s how websites work. Cookies are needed if you are doing anything more than reading text sitting on a web page.

While we at Aloye Investigation Services do not use cookie data for anything other than to facilitate your experience on our website, other websites have a much different policy. Namely they collect your cookies and sell the data to data aggregators.

So if you visited our website, and then you went to visit google.com, google took your https://www.aloyeinvestigation.com cookies along with every other cookie in your web browser and sold them all to as many data aggregators who threw money at google for your data. I can tell your that your data is worth approximately $5 a month, but when data aggregators buy in bulk they get a month worth of your data for 50 cents.

That means the whole world knows exactly when you visited our website, as well as what you looked at, how long you stayed, the name of your computer, your unique ip address on the internet, your gps location, your computer’s network card id, and a lot of other data.

The computer’s unique network card id can be matched to the serial number of the computer it was manufacturered for, or it can be traced to the store who sold it and credit card used to buy it, to prove you are the owner of the device that accessed that website as displayed in the Cooke file.

The same holds true for your IP address. Your internet provider assigned it to you, and it can be tracked back to you via subpoena.

That is how the intimate details of your internet access makes its way to advertisers.

The same holds true with apps. When an iPhone or android app makes a web call using apple webkit or android’s webui, the website deposits cookies in the web browser on your device even though you used an app to access the resource.

Both the resource and your app will use the cookies. So using an app is no different in terms of the finished cookie although there are significant technical differences and process related differences. However our focus is on the result not the technicals for how it creates the result.

Nevertheless, accessing the web by browser or by app gives advertisers and aggregators a lot of info about you. Imagine this over time. The advertisers have your complete psychological profile, and know more about you than you know about you.

If you are in the mood for some technical details you can read about the anatomy of a cookie here: https://blog.mobinner.com/ad-newbies/anatomy-of-a-cookie/

This concludes Part 1 of How to Catch a Cardinal, but hopefully it lays out how your data arrives in the hands of large aggregators who cannot wait to sell it to everyone and anyone who will buy. Even though your data does not contain your name or personal information, that can be easily obtained by looking at some of the data points in the Cookies.

In Part 2 of How to Catch a Cardinal, we will examine how to buy the data, and how to ingest and match up the data to identify whose data it is.