Here is a list of what one of the bigger players in advanced tracking knows about you based on gathering your surfing habits on a variety of sites. Stunned yet?

Ads that magically appear to be eerily well tailored to your likes and needs have been popping up more and more over the past two years or so, haven’t they? And not only on Facebook, which is a well-known example of tracking and tagging your preferences to the point of being a potential privacy nightmare. See, those little ‘cookies’ you already know about have gotten a lot more sophisticated, and in many cases are now replaced or at least augmented by what’s called ‘beacons’, which are little programs that can track and store a lot more information about you.

While the Wall Street Journal is acting surprised, as if this is a new thing, fact is that it’s not. Tracking technology has become a lot more sophisticated over the past few years. Data can be collected about your surfing habits on a multitude of sites; this data then is aggregated, measured, compared, analyzed, profiled, compiled…and then sold. There are companies that offer these technologies, and then sell this information to advertisers, or directly to sites.

A good data mining company can figure out your approximate age, demographics, what types of movies and food you like, about how much money you make, who you tend to socialize with, if you’re the type who spends more for convenience, who else might live in your household, what type of medical problems you might have, and a lot more.

At this point, mainstream is doing this on a lot larger, more sophisticated scale than we are in adult entertainment. Sure, we have ad networks, most sites use some form of basic tracking method or service, and some of the larger sites and tube networks have their own tracking mechanisms, (some are custom solutions that are quite good but work best on larger, interconnected networks) –  but none are quite as detailed and far reaching as the mainstream big boys’. Yet.

BlueKai ain’t Statcounter, that’s for sure.

But even free tracking services have become a lot more sophisticated and detailed. Check out the new and improved Google Analytics. If you dive deep enough you’ll find some interesting nuggets. It’s not nearly as sophisticated as BlueKai’s (et al) tracking mechanisms, and it certainly can’t track consumer behavior over unrelated site networks, but it’s a start.

For now.