Buying patterns of customers and suggest individual responses. The use of computer to combine data from multiple sources and create electronic dossiers of detailed information on individuals is called profiling.
For example, several thousand of the most popular Web sites allow DoubleClick (owned by Google), an Internet advertising broker, to track activities of theirs visitors in exchange for revenue from advertisements based on visitor information DoubleClick gathers. DoubleClick uses this information to a create profile of each online visitor, adding more detail to the profile as the visitor access an associated DoubleClick site. Over time, DoubleClick can create a detailed dossier of a person’s spending and computing habits on the web that is sold to companies to help them target their Web ads more precisely.