Browsing profiles

The process of profiling (also known as "tracking") assembles and analyzes several events, each attributable to a single originating entity, in order to gain information (especially patterns of activity) relating to the originating entity. On the Internet, certain organizations employ profiling of people's web browsing, collecting the URLs of sites visited. The resulting profiles may or may not link with information that personally identifies the people who did the browsing.

Some web-oriented marketing-research organizations may use this practice legitimately, for example: in order to construct profiles of 'typical Internet users'. Such profiles, which describe average trends of large groups of Internet users rather than of actual individuals, can then prove useful for market analysis. Although the aggregate data does not constitute a privacy violation, some people believe that the initial profiling does.

Profiling becomes a more contentious privacy issue, on the other hand, when data-matching associates the profile of an individual with personally-identifiable information of the individual.

Governments and organizations may set up Honeypot (computing) websites - featuring controversial topics - with the purpose of attracting and tracking unwary people. This constitutes a potential danger for individuals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_privacy