Cis 207

Information is used in a variety of different ways as it flows from user to the business and back again to the user. The moment you put in the web address and are directed to the websites homepage, information is being gathered. When you register for the first time, they find out where you live, age, sex, married or divorced and sometimes number of people in the house or your average yearly income. All of this just to get an idea of the demographic and target audience for a service provided or a product sold by a company and allow them to tailor their products and features to better suit the clientele.

With marketing software, the same company that we just signed up for, can add scripts to the website, which will allow them to search through keywords used and websites visited to place ads on other sites as you browse the web. They can also use this same software to “recommend based on previous searches” and suggest other products or services that may or may not be related to what you are looking for at that particular moment. Most companies also have an ad mailer that goes out regularly to all the email accounts associated with that site.

Accounting software takes care of your purchases, the storing of your billing and shipping address, card number on file and past purchases. For security purposes, most sites even though they store your card information, they do not store certain pieces of it such as the expiration date or the card security code (CVV). Some sites may also ask you a pre-determined security question that was setup when first registered on the site before allowing you to make a purchase. After the purchase the user will usually receive a confirmation email letting them know that the purchase was successful and the package is now on its way.

The small company that I work for still uses a paper filing method and I believe a software as a service for accounting purposes. However, everything we do still starts out on paper before it makes it into...