Data hungry website

We all know that websites are tracking us all of the time, as I mentioned the data tracking economy when I explored my Facebook data. I know from inheriting a mess at work that there is a web of 3rd party tracking going on in the world, but wow, I wasn’t expecting this. 

Safari has built in blocking cross domain tracking. This is good, because this is the kind of tracking that ends up in brokers hands and would be easy to lose control of. According to Safari:

Some websites allow data collection companies called trackers to track your browsing activity. Trackers can follow you across multiple websites and combine your activity into a profile for advertisers.

Let’s look at how it works. I decided to have a look at theage.com.au

Simply click the shield icon to the left of the address bar.

This will display details for the website you are looking at.

To see a list of the top tracking websites, click the info icon in the top left. Below you can see my top 11 sites that have tried to track me. 

Reflection

There is a lot of tracking going on, more than I realised, 55 trackers blocked from Britannica.com, that is a lot of interest in my data. Personally I’m shocked, I thought Britannica had more credibility than that. It makes me wonder about the part we all play in this. Every small business jumping onto Facebook pixel so that they can use it to track and target potential customers, or using Google adds or other tracking plugins on their website and understandably so, they want to be better informed to be more successful. But in the case of WordPress sites, third party and more tracking can be introduced with plugins, so the website owners aren’t even aware that they are contributing to the data economy. 

I wonder if we could convince small businesses not to use Facebook pixel? This would be a challenge, first they would need to understand the value of privacy. Then assess the value of the pixel to them – it sounds great, retarget people who have visited your website. But what is the value in real terms to the average business – not just a percentage increase in engagement, an actual dollar amount. Given my exposure to making websites for small businesses, I suspect the dollar amount would be quite small in most cases.