Among them were the marketing and advertising arms of Google, Amazon, and Oracle’s BlueKai consumer data division, which reported a massive data exposure this summer, leaving billions of records—including personally identifiable information—accessible to the open internet without a password.
Zajac was floored when The Markup showed her how many trackers appeared on the site. She said she learned a hard lesson: “If it’s free, that doesn’t mean it’s free. It just means it doesn’t cost money.” Instead, it costs your website visitors’ privacy.
Website operators may agree to set cookies—small strings of text that identify you—from one outside company. But they are not always aware that the code setting those cookies can also load dozens of other trackers along with them, like nesting dolls, each collecting user data.
We scanned more than 80,000 of the world’s most popular websites with Blacklight and found more than 5,000 were “fingerprinting” users, identifying them even if they block third-party cookies.
We also found more than 12,000 websites loaded scripts that watch and record all user interactions on a page—including scrolls and mouse movements. It’s called “session recording” and we found a higher prevalence of it than researchers had documented before.
More than 200 popular websites used a particularly invasive technique that captures personal information people enter on forms—like names, phone numbers, and passwords—before they hit send. It’s called “key logging” and it’s sometimes done as part of session recording.
The use of cookies by websites is well known, and most Americans understand how they work. But even some website operators don’t always know how they get there: often from free plug-ins like comments sections, social media sharing buttons, and tools that embed posts from social media—conveniences people have come to expect on the internet but that small website operators don’t have the resources to build themselves.
Marketing and advertising companies are happy to provide these tools for free in exchange for user data, which is used to construct ever-more-refined profiles of internet users.
Google Analytics trackers loaded on 69 percent of 80,000 popular websites scanned with Blacklight. Google Analytics gives website operators insight into how many people visit a website and which pages. The catch: Google, the world’s largest digital ad seller, also gets the data. The company’s cookie policy allows it to connect that data to the advertising profiles it already has on people, but Google spokesperson Elijah Lawal said it doesn’t do it as a policy unless the website operators agree.
However, in order for website operators to get information from Google Analytics about the demographics of their visitors, they have to allow data collection by Google’s advertising arm, DoubleClick, which adds the information to user profiles.
The second most common tracker we found on popular sites: Facebook. Blacklight found its pixel on a third of popular sites we scanned. Facebook’s trackers can follow you even if you’re not logged in to Facebook and link your browsing history to your profile for ad targeting. Website operators include the pixel to measure clicks from their ads on Facebook’s platforms.
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