Google Is Tracking You On 86% Of The Top 50,000 Websites On The Planet

Google is tracking website visitors on 86% of the top 50,000 websites on the planet, according to a recent study from DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused Google competitor.

That’s over twice as many as Facebook.

In response, the company is releasing DuckDuckGo Tracker Radar, a dataset of trackers that it collects as it spiders millions of websites for the DuckDuckGo search engine. That dataset powers DuckDuckGo’s own privacy-centric browser extensions and mobile apps, and can now be freely incorporated into any other company’s privacy toolset.

Currently, that dataset includes 5,326 different entities with trackers.

Other companies tracking your online movements include Adobe and Amazon, on about 22% of those top sites, and other data and advertising-focused companies like Rubicon, TowerData, and Oracle.

Using the Internet these days feels like being haunted by the ghosts of browsing past. The shoes or headphones you shopped for yesterday are following you around relentlessly today. 

The rationale is simple: knowing what you click on and where you go informs ad networks about your needs and desires. When they know what you want, they can place ads in your path for those products or services.

That sounds fairly innocuous, and it can be, but the problem is that at scale — and on the open data market — you now have hundreds of virtual avatars in systems that are not under your control. They’re profiles that match you to varying degrees: age, location, ethnicity, interests, and potentially much more personal information.

In some cases, such as Google, advertisers can bid on audiences that include you while never seeing your personal data. In other, less ethical cases, data collectors might sell your profile to the highest bidder.

Only 19% of people use some form of tracker blocking, DuckDuckGo says.

“Too many people believe that you simply can’t expect privacy on the Internet,” DuckDuckGo said in a statement. “We disagree and have made it our mission to set a new standard of trust online.”