资料：Imagine you went to a restaurant with your girlfriend, had a burger, paid with a credit card, and left. The next time you go there, the waiter or waitress, armed with your profile data, greets you with, “Hey Joe, how are you？ Mary is over there in the seat you sat last time. Would you like to join her for dinner again？” Then you find out that your burger has been cooked and placed on the table. Forget the fact that you are with another date and are on a diet that doesn’t include burgers.

Sound a little bizarre？ To some, this is the restaurant equivalent of the Internet. The Net’s ability to profile you through your visits to and interactions at websites provides marketers with an enormous amount of data on you——some of which you may not want them to have.

Are you aware that almost every time you access a website you get a “cookie”？ Unfortunately, it’s not the Mrs. Field’s recipe. A cookie on the Internet is a computer code sent by the site to your computer——usually without your knowledge. During the entire period of time that you are at the site, the cookie is collecting information about yourself, including where you visit, how long you stay there, and how frequently you return to certain pages.

While this may sound scary enough, cookies aren’t even the latest in technology. A new system call I-librarian Alexa——named after the legendary third century B.C. library in Alexandria, Egypt——does even more. While cookies track what you are doing at one site. Alexa collects data on all your web activities, such as which site you visit next, how long you stay there, whether you click on advertisements, etc. All this information is available to marketers, who use it to market more effectively to you. Not only do you not get paid for providing the information, you probably don’t even know that you are giving it.

The author makes up the restaurant story in order to_________ .

• A.show the good services offered in some web restaurants
• B.criticize some restaurants for the poor services
• C.show the Internet’s ability to collect data on you
• D.prove the incredible power of the Internet to change your diet