A STUDY ON USER'S AWARENESS AND PERCEPTION ON COMPANIES COLLECTING THEIR DATA FOR PROVIDING CUSTOMIZED MARKETING

Abstract

This project aims to study awareness levels and perception of users about data being collected through web tracking over the internet so as to provide them with personalized marketing contents, sometimes through AI as well. The aim is to try to find out whether the users give more importance to privacy or to comfort or there is going to be a trade-off between the two. With the growing demand for data analytics in order to provide data driven solutions for business problems, companies have been trying really hard to gather as much information from their customers as they can. Not only this but using the data, analytics and AI, various e-commerce players have implemented different features such as recommendation widget in their apps. These features have actually become the bare minimum features that are expected to be incorporated in any e-commerce app. However, this has some positive as well as negative aspects as well. On one hand it is helping companies to know their customers better and server them as per their need and saving customers from getting overloaded with the information that they don’t need while on the other hand it also puts the customers into the risk of various privacy related issues. Gathering a lot of customer data and using them for finding solutions to different business problems raises a lot of privacy related concerns among the customers. These days internet users, specially the ones using internet over smartphone, knowingly or unknowingly share their data with various companies. This project tries to understand the perception of various internet users on this subject and also understand their awareness level for the same. The study has been conducted using descriptive research methodology with both qualitative and quantitative data analysis. The data has been collected through personal interviews and online questionnaire survey. The quantitative analysis has been done using R and PowerBI. As a conclusion of this study, it can be said that internet users are aware of web tracking and their comfort level in letting the companies collect their data varies according to the context.