I feel like we should unify the copyright and privacy laws.<p>If I copy a Disney movie without their knowledge and then extract value from it, for example by watching the movie without paying, everyone agrees that this is theft. And punishment is generally strong to excessive.<p>If a website copies my private data without my knowledge or even after I decline permission by sending DNT headers, that is somehow considered completely fine.<p>But to me, the value of my private data is vastly higher than the value of watching a copied movie. And the potential for financial damages stemming from a stolen identity is also much highest than the real damages from someone downloading an mp4.<p>I suggest that we classify the secret collection of private data as theft.<p>Edit: With my wording, I was referring to this old pro-copyright ad: <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU</a>
This is just like a highscore game ...<p>33 Trackers | 60 Third-Party Cookies
<a href="https://themarkup.org/blacklight/?url=edition.cnn.com" rel="nofollow">https://themarkup.org/blacklight/?url=edition.cnn.com</a><p>32 Trackers | 53 Third-Party Cookies
<a href="https://themarkup.org/blacklight/?url=wsj.com" rel="nofollow">https://themarkup.org/blacklight/?url=wsj.com</a><p>The newspaper business is digging it's own grave.<p>"This website could be monitoring your keystrokes and mouse clicks."
As always, it is truly amazing that Wikipedia, a top-10 global website, has none of this stuff: <a href="https://themarkup.org/blacklight/?url=en.wikipedia.org" rel="nofollow">https://themarkup.org/blacklight/?url=en.wikipedia.org</a>
There's some good stuff in here, but they're also using a very expansive definition of "tracker" that in some cases I think is just unfair.<p>For example Adobe TypeKit serves fonts. It's not ad tech at all. The only thing it tracks is how many times a font was served. Adobe does also have ad tracking technology but TypeKit isn't part of it.<p>Likewise the tool's author seems to misunderstand AWS CloudFront, which is a CDN and does not itself do any tracking nor is it connected to any Amazon ad tech.
As per this tool, if you value privacy visiting pornhub is many times better than visiting TechCrunch.<p>I wasn’t surprised that TechCrunch has so many trackers but surprised that a porn site has only one.
That's really well done. I tried several ecommerce, airline, travel, etc, sites. I was surprised with the extent of fingerprinting and 3rd party sites.<p>For example, American Airlines, aa.com: 17 ad trackers, 32
third party cookies, canvas fingerprinting, session keyboard and mouse tracking, data to facebook, linked in, amazon, and more. Ouch.
Looks interesting and is definitely a required tool to show what websites are doing that average users don’t realize.<p>Sadly the really bad players detect that this is not a normal user and redirect to a error page.<p>You will have to try harder to fool them into thinking your headless browser is a real user. Probably your test device is in a server center and they detect the IP isn’t a end user IP.<p>Hope you get it working
I tried some sites I thought might get a high score. Mostly news sites and webstores since they like to know a lot about you.<p>Fox News [1] and Breitbart [2] got scarily high scores<p>[1] <a href="https://themarkup.org/blacklight/?url=foxnews.com" rel="nofollow">https://themarkup.org/blacklight/?url=foxnews.com</a><p>[2] <a href="https://themarkup.org/blacklight/?url=breitbart.com" rel="nofollow">https://themarkup.org/blacklight/?url=breitbart.com</a>
If any website implements this chromium headless bug [1] then one could potentially avoid detection in blacklight.<p>[1] - <a href="https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1090429" rel="nofollow">https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=109042...</a>
I forget sometimes how much happier I am in my philistine pig-ignorance of what really goes on.<p>The title reminds me of two things. The blacklight sketch on SNL where everything had gross stuff all over it, and a week ago when I was trying to figure out why a button on a website wasn't working in Firefox, and so I opened the network tab.<p>Every time I even moused over anything there were four network requests. To so many different origins. I did not want to see this (like the joke of turning your lights on in NYC so the roaches have a chance to scatter before you walk into the kitchen.) I kinda miss when we had a visual indicator that network traffic was going on. I might still not want to know but the social pressure of it would at least slow their roll a little bit. Maybe 1 request per mouseover.
Maybe publishers who do well would proudly let their users know? A badge of sorts?
<a href="https://themarkup.org/blacklight/?url=attic.city" rel="nofollow">https://themarkup.org/blacklight/?url=attic.city</a>
>87 percent of websites are tracking you. This new tool will let you run a creepiness check.<p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/25/privacy-check-blacklight/" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/25/privacy...</a><p><a href="https://archive.vn/rOpOL" rel="nofollow">https://archive.vn/rOpOL</a>
Looks good, but unfortunate name clash - I assume this is unrelated to the established Blacklight discovery platform used (ironically, considering The Markup's domain) in the Panama Papers exposure?<p><a href="https://projectblacklight.org/" rel="nofollow">https://projectblacklight.org/</a><p><a href="https://source.opennews.org/articles/people-and-tech-behind-panama-papers/" rel="nofollow">https://source.opennews.org/articles/people-and-tech-behind-...</a>
Check out <a href="https://themarkup.org/blacklight/?url=wapo.com" rel="nofollow">https://themarkup.org/blacklight/?url=wapo.com</a><p>Astonishing.
Does anyone know of a way to quantify the cost of ad-trackers in terms of cpu/memory/bandwidth/battery?
How much more responsive would websites be without all the trackers?
How much longer would we keep our phones if they didn't struggle under the weight of all this tracking?
How much less data center capacity would be required?
How much more bandwidth would be available?
This does not work with GDPR compliant sites (the few that exist). I wonder if it would make sense to use something similar to [0] to auto-accept, note in the results that there is a consent gate and then list the trackers in the accepted state?<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/" rel="nofollow">https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/</a>
This is why websites/initiatives like scroll are so effective. I signed up and pay dollars a month to avoid paywalls and help fund news sources [that should also be avoiding ad-pixels!]<p><a href="https://scroll.com/" rel="nofollow">https://scroll.com/</a>
ghostery plugin much more effective if you use chrome it tells you as you visit a site and gives you the option to block it, I don't know why this is ranked 1 on HN