Yesterday I received an email from Virgin Trains reminding me that fares for a journey I had been looking at won’t last long – nothing unusual in that, except I wasn’t logged in to the Virgin website at the time I was browsing the fares !!

My question is does BA use similar technology and are able to track a specific individual browsing fares without the person being logged into their BA account ?

I’d also be interested from any IT guru’s as to how this is done and what you can do to stop it, if anything ? I had always assumed that tracking cookies were anonymised so how did Virgin know enough to send me a specifically targeted email – even down to the date and destination I was looking at ?