Security News > 2021 > February > Ever felt that a few big tech companies are following you around the internet? That's because ... they are

Ever felt that a few big tech companies are following you around the internet? That's because ... they are
2021-02-25 12:04

A new extension for Google Chrome has made explicit how most popular sites on the internet load resources from one or more of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon.

The extension, Big Tech Detective, shows the extent to which websites exchange data with these four companies by reporting on them.

Big Tech Detective will spot sites that use Google Analytics to report on web traffic, or host Google ads, or use a service hosted on Amazon Web Services such as Chartbeat analytics - which embeds a script that pings its service every 15 seconds according to this post - but that is not the same as routing your data through the services.

Privacy is a third issue and the ubiquity of tracking techniques, not only from these big four tech companies but also from elsewhere in the ad tech industry, is impacting society in unexpected ways.

Did we find any sites that do not use any of these companies? One was sqlite.org, the official site for the widely used open source database engine, which also serves as a demonstration of how fast and lightweight it is.

Big Tech Detective also blocked its sponsor's site, the anti-monopoly project at the Economic Security Project, reporting links to Google and Facebook.


News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/02/25/big_tech_extension/