Everywhere you go online, you’re being tracked. Almost every time you visit a website, trackers gather data about your browsing and funnel it back into targeted advertising systems, which build up detailed profiles about your interests and make big profits in the process. In some places, you’re tracked more than others. In a little-noticed change at the end of last year, thousands of websites started being more transparent about how many companies your data is being shared with.
analysis of the top 10,000 most popular websites shows dozens of sites say they are sharing data with more than 1,000 companies, while thousands of other websites are sharing data with hundreds of firms. Quiz and puzzle website JetPunk tops the pile, listing 1,809 “partners” that may collect personal information, including “browsing behavior or unique IDs.” More than 20 websites from publisher Dotdash Meredith—including investopedia.com, people.com, and allrecipes.
manually verified all the websites mentioned in this story, visiting each to confirm the number of partners they displayed. We looked at the highest total number of partners within the whole dataset, and the highest number of partners for the top 1,000 most popular websites. The process, which is only a snapshot of how websites share data, provides one view of the complex ecosystem. The results can vary depending on where in the world someone visits a website from.