Unexpected phone call from Discover

[SoCalGardener]

If you're familiar with my posts, you'll undoubtedly know that I tend to do late-night, after-taking-sleeping-pills goofing around on my phone. (During the day, I'm on a laptop and much more coherent.)  So, not long ago, I was logged on at Discover, and for reasons I can't explain, decided to look at their home equity-related loans. I say I can't explain why I was there because I have no plans of EVER having any kind of lien on my house, so getting a home equity loan or HELOC will never happen.

Anyway, I logged out eventually and forgot about it. Until the next day when I got a phone call from Discover. My FIRST thought was that it was a scam call, just coincidentally spoofing Discover's name/number the day after I played around on Discover's site. (I've had that happen before, albeit with a different company.) But, no, it really was Discover, and she started out saying they'd noticed my interest in their home equity products and wondered if I might have any questions she could answer. I was shocked. I realize that being logged in to my account doesn't make me anonymous, but I thought browsing the site for the hell of it was my business! I definitely did not expect a phone call.

I politely told her that I was just looking and have no plans to ever actually get a home equity loan, and that was that. She was very nice, nothing to complain about at all, I'm just saying it surprised me that they called!

[coldfusion]

The amount of data captured is staggering.  Your approximate geographic location, the device type and browser used, what pages you viewed, how much time you spent on each page, and so on.   Google Analytics is currently the most widely used service that collects the data and you can use their tools to build dashboards and generate reports, or you can download that data to your own operational data stores and use your own tools to leverage the data. 

Some of the data is often aggregated and used for various site optimization purposes to improve the user experience but as you learned for yourself if you are logged in, the site owner can directly correlate that data and specifically target you based upon your viewing behavior.

[SoCalGardener]

Yes, when I used to run a few websites, I used StatCounter and SiteMeter's paid accounts. They let me sort/view data any which way! By geographic region, operating system, browser name/version, which pages were viewed, how long, where the visitor arrived from, where they went when they left, etc. But I was using the info passively, i.e., just to see where I needed to work on improving the sites. Like if people were leaving a certain page one second after landing on it, I wanted to know why so I could fix it; I'd tweak it and then see how that affected the stats.

This call from Discover just seemed...weird. Almost invasive, actually. If I WANTED to talk to someone, I would've initiated that.