![]() ![]() This means that when you visit a page with a single tracker on it, your browser is actually talking to two websites: The website you're looking at and the website it's loading the tracking code from.īut lots of sites have far more than one tracker. The second problem is that ad networks and cross-site tracking generally rely on components pulled from third-party websites as a page is loaded. And if you do, you probably won't spot it until it's too late. Simply, the more ads and ad networks you're interacting with, the more likely you are to encounter something bad. ![]() A lot of malvertising works by impersonating well known brands, and the scammers do it so well that you have almost no chance of spotting it. Ad companies don't encourage this, but despite their efforts malicious advertising-malvertising-is resurgent in 2023. The first is that ad distribution networks-the amazingly efficient, just-in-time auction houses that fill ad slots as a page loads-are just as good at distributing scams, links to phishing sites, and malware downloads, as they are at distributing ads. Ads and trackers aren't just a privacy problem, they come with a pair of security problems too. For others, the targeted ad economy and the cross-site tracking it relies upon are an unacceptable violation of their privacy.īut that's not the whole story. The ad economy is what keeps sites like Facebook and YouTube free after all, and they would rather see ads that might at least appeal to them than something chosen at random. Some people see this kind of tracking as benign, or at least a necessary evil. You likely don't know who they are, what they know or how much, how securely the data is stored, how long it's kept, or who it's been shared with, sold to, or stolen by. ![]() The price you pay for the popular, free-to-use-websites like Facebook and YouTube is that somewhere, somebody is amassing a whole lot of data about you. This model comes with advantages, but it also comes with significant risks to both your privacy and security. Because of the way that ad tech works, different numbers of items may be downloaded for apparently identical page loads.) How tracking affects security and privacyĬross-site ad tracking follows you from site to site and builds up a rough picture of your likes, dislikes, and demographics, which is then used to help ad providers choose relevant, targeted ads to show you (or at least, that's the theory.) (Note that if you try to repeat this experiment you might get slightly different results, although we expect them to be similar to ours. The mean average is heavily skewed by YouTube and Samsung, which accounted for 100 items between them. That's a mean average of seven on each site, and a median of two. Siteīrowser Guard blocked a total of 172 items across the 25 pages tested. Where I was asked to log in and I had an account, I logged in, and where I was asked to accept cookies I did. So, on Google I looked at a search results page, on YouTube I looked a page displaying a video, and so on. I looked at one page on each site, and chose pages that were broadly representative of what somebody might go there to do. The table shows the number of items-ads, cross-site trackers etc-that Browser Guard blocked on a single page on each of the top 25 most visited websites. So what happens on the top sites has an outsized effect on users because the top sites don't just reach more people, they also keep people for longer.īefore I get into the why I was counting how many things Browser Guard blocks, take a look at the numbers in the table below. Web users have always spent a disprorportionate amount of their time on the web's most popular sites, and websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Twitch are designed to keep you hanging around for as long as possible. I know this because I decided to take Browser Guard, the Malwarebytes' browser extension that blocks ads and keeps you safe from trackers, scams, malvertising, and other online threats, for a wander through the web's top 25 sites. Do you know how many see-everything-you're-doing-on-the-web trackers get loaded into your browser when you watch a YouTube video? Would you care to guess?
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