Patent ID: 7181412

Claim:
A method of collecting consumer data, comprising: offering one or more incentives for prospective consumers to register with a provider of services; receiving a request at the provider of services from a consumer to register with the provider of services to receive at least one of the offered incentives; registering the consumer with the provider of services, wherein registering the consumer includes receiving consumer-specific information about the consumer; assigning a unique identifier to at least one of the registered consumer and a computer of the registered consumer that is connected to a network to record network activity of the registered consumer using the unique identifier at the provider of services, wherein the unique identifier is persistent across different network sessions and the network is the Internet; modifying a browser application on the registered consumer's computer to enable communications sent to and from the registered consumer's computer to be directed through the provider of services, located at a domain on the network, to record the network activity of the registered consumer; directing at least some communications addressed to the destination server on the network from the registered consumer's computer to a server of the provider of services; receiving at the provider of services data requests from the registered consumer's computer addressed to the destination server; recording at the provider of services at least part of the received data requests as associated with the unique identifier; communicating the received data requests from the provider of services to the destination server capable of fulfilling the received data requests; receiving data at the provider of services in response to the received data requests from the destination server; recording at the provider of services at least part of the received data as associated with the unique identifier; communicating the received data from the provider of services to the registered consumer's computer; aggregating the received data requests and received data associated with more than one unique identifier based on the recorded network activity of the registered consumers associated with the unique identifiers; and generating a database by the provider of services of individual and aggregated consumer network activity, wherein the individual consumer network activity includes the received data requests and the received data that is recorded as being associated with the unique identifier, and wherein the aggregated consumer network activity includes the received data requests and the received data that is aggregated as being associated with the more than one unique identifiers.