Planning tour is always a thought process task. Number of destinations strikes into your mind. You start browsing internet for travel sites which can help you out in shop around the best prices for hotel booking and tickets.
There are horses of travel websites across the world. Some websites come up with great deals or offers. Renowned websites always arouse your curiosity to book your tours by locking their deals.
Recently, many renowned travel websites including Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, Orbitz and Hotels.com have been accused of fixing the prices with some of the largest hotel companies.
Class-action lawsuit alleged that numbers of such travel websites going hand in hand with hotels including Hilton, Sheraton, Starwood, Marriot and International just to make more profit by fixing the hotel booking prices. These Travel websites make hotel chains promise not to sell rooms below a minimum rate. There is a fixed price which every tour operator offers to traveler. Interestingly, there is no such ‘best prices’ but instead there is only a fixed price.
Online Slate Magazine published a researched article last year based on the method of online marketing to allure the users. The number of E-commerce websites including Amazon and ebay were accused of creating dynamic pages for every user with different prices.
It proves that how E-commerce websites track your cookies to know your buying capacity. They make dynamic pages accordingly and sell the same product tagging higher prices to different online users at the same time but in far away countries. It is very hard to catch them red-handed for such bad online activities.
Recent activity of these travel websites makes us to think that tech-tools are used to hatch conspiracy for making more profit online. That is why, advertisers love the cookies and web-bug tools.
What is 'Cookies'?
A ‘Cookies’ is a block of text (digital identification tags) which the websites places in a file on a computer hard disk of a person to track his activity. While a code in the cookie file enables the website to label him as a particular user, It does not identify him by name or address unless he has registered himself and provided the sites with such information or set up preferences in his browser to do so automatically.
There is an option for user to block the cookies. Once user block the cookies, there are more chances that user does not enjoy all the features of a website. Interestingly, cookies are sometimes termed as “necessary evil” as they support the features and facilitate the E-Commerce activities; they are the key to the “personalization” of the web.
Once you visit an E-Commerce website and buy a product, cookies record all your activity. Such activities are useful for data analyst to know your likes; dislikes; buying capacity; interests; date of birth; contact number; address and e-mail Id.
Web-bug is one more tool which is adored by advertising companies and data analyst. Web bugs are very helpful in creating strong database of online users. A web bug could be a part of a banner ad on a website that a person is viewing. The embedded instructions in a browser transmit the information to the advertiser’s server, like the Url of the page the person is visiting which it thinks fit to arouse the interest of the viewer on the web. Surprisingly, this is one way exchange of information and it occurs even though the person has not clicked on the banner ad.
Such activities are recorded to make the website user friendly. These activities are supposed to use in good faith as per Cyber Law. This is used rarely in good faith in the time of changing world of technology when humanity is depending on machines and gadgets instead of more physical actions. Unfortunately, very less country has come up with provision where such bad activities are enough to constitute the cyber crime. To avoid online shopping vulnerability you have to take precautions by yourself. Some of the safe browsing tips are below mentioned by
cosmic travel hub team.
Safe browsing tips:
- Don’t save your passwords in your browser.
- Keep removing your cookies and temporary internet files by the time.
- Try to shop around the prices physically too, if you get opportunity.
- Keep changing your password. It sounds very stupid but it will save your important data.
- Use genuine anti-virus program only.
- Try to shop around the prices through different ISP which has different IP address.
