You may have heard about tracking primarily in the context of advertising. However, it’s also a powerful tool when it comes to the spread of false information. Why is that? When you browse the internet or your social network feed, your behavior, interests, contacts in some instances and more are tracked by various parties across websites in order to create an extremely detailed profile of you to sell to others without your knowledge or consent. These profiles are used for personalized advertising but can also serve to present any kind of targeted information to you.

您可能聽過的「追蹤」通常都是在廣告產業的用法。然而要用來散佈假消息時，這也是相當強大的工具。怎麼說呢？當您上網或是滑過社群網路的貼文時，不同業者會追蹤您的行為、興趣、聯絡人與各種資料，用以完全針對您建立一套精準的個人資訊，並在您不知情、未同意的情況下賣給其他人。這些資訊可用來對您進行個人化廣告，也可以用來針對您精準投放各種資訊。