Complete Story
07/21/2015
20 media home pages checked; more than 500 trackers found
When landing on Politico’s home page, your browser loads about 100 pieces of code known as Trackers – behind your back. These trackers are used mostly for advertising: detecting/building user profiles, serving targeted ads, picking up the brand with the best fit on a realtime bidding platform. Other trackers are beacons aimed, for instance, at following the reader from one site to another (the kind you gleefully thank when the North Face jacket you once looked at ends up pursuing you for months). Another kind of tracker is quite indispensable, it involves analytics, counting users, sessions, time spent, etc. With the advent of the social web came all sorts of trackers, users’ connectors to social or affiliation programs. For good measure, some sites also insert chunks of code aimed at organizing A/B Testing — submitting configuration A to a segment of the audience and configuration B to the other to see what works best. (Weirdly enough, A/B trackers are by far the least deployed, accounting for 1% of the total.)
In fairness, Politico is often a fast site and doesn’t always load its full stack of trackers. Most likely, the loading process times out (as show before, when I wanted to make a screenshot of the page, it was stuck to “only” 89 trackers.
