A good insight into how much your web and app activity is tracked by advertising and third party tools.
Most marketing people will be aware of this, but if outside the industry you may be shocked.
New sites were the worst:
Among all the sites I visited, news sites, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, had the most tracking resources. This is partly because the sites serve more ads, which load more resources and additional trackers. But news sites often engage in more tracking than other industries, according to a study from Princeton.
NYT
Don’t miss the footnotes on the article – they are the best part:
Like other media companies, The Times collects data on its visitors when they read stories like this one. For more detail please see our privacy policy and our publisher’s description of The Times’s practices and continued steps to increase transparency and protections.
However, there’s also reason to be wary of overreacting. Ben Thompson provides good counterpoints to the discussion – in particular, that we need to be careful of assuming that every ‘tracker’ is actually out to steal your privacy. Many ‘trackers’ are actually necessary scripts to run your site eg javascript libraries, etc.
