When data breaches occur, it can be extremely costly towards a company. They may be required to pay fees directly to consumers, or pay for technology that increases their security so a hack does not occur again. Either way, corporations should understand the cost that a hack of consumers’ information could cost them. Ponemon Institute researched this and found, “data breaches cost companies an average of $221 per compromised record – of which $145 pertains to indirect costs, which include abnormal turnover or churn of customers and $76 represents the direct costs incurred to resolve the data breach, such as investments in technologies or legal fees” (2016 Cost of). Corporations should invest more into security systems …show more content…
These types of trackers are known as web trackers, and are utilized on almost every website on the web. Web tracking is important to look at because Americans do express concern over internet cookies and web tracking. A poll of 1017 Americans done by Craig Newmark, Rad Campaign and Lincoln Park Strategies found, “72% are concerned about ‘Tracking Cookies’ placed on computers without consent” (Newmark). Web tracking is a process that involves a consumer as well as a website and other third parties. A consumer visits a website and then a web cookie from that site is downloaded onto the computer of the user. Third party advertisers also download a cookie that stores information about a machine. These cookies provide a unique identifier to the computer and the user. Then, if the consumer visits other websites with the same third party, or web owner, they will also know that this consumer visited another one of their pages. Tracking cookies have become extremely prominent on web pages. Keynote Systems did a report in 2012 and found “ 86% of the sites place one or more third-party tracking cookies on their visitors” (Messmer). As discussed earlier, this compromises a person's privacy information because the third-party trackers can discover which other sites a person may have been on, and considering most sites have them, a third-party cookie could nearly know every website that a person