In news that shouldn’t shock anyone TechRadar Pro reported similar statistics last year, Google trackers were found to account for half of all trackers found on the internet.
Analysis of data from the last semi-annual report of Lokker, a security visualization company Online Data Privacy Report (opens in a new tab)VPN service Atlas VPN revealed that of all the trackers found on the web, as much as 49.9% belong to Google itself.
YouTube and Doubleclick, which are Google companies, have 13.8% and 8.3% share of online trackers, respectively. Facebook trackers account for 15.7% of online trackers, Microsoft made the list with 6%, and Hotjar, a behavioral analytics tool, has 6.3%.
Storage of sensitive data
Websites are full of trackers – little pieces of websites that track people as they go about their digital activities. Various tech companies then use these trackers to create pseudonymous user profiles and sell them to advertisers.
With these profiles, some ads seem to follow you across the vast plains of the internet, and others seem eerily related to your interests – even if you’re not logged into the service owned by the tech giants in charge.
All in all, a shocking 93.7% of all online trackers come from Google, Facebook or Microsoft.
These trackers are used to track people’s browsing habits and store IP addresses as well as other personal information. They help businesses understand how consumers interact with websites and make purchases.
However, there are other privacy threats that can affect people’s online safety that big tech companies take advantage of. For example, session recovery scripts were found on 35% of the websites analyzed.
These scripts record sessions (people’s interactions with the website) to better understand how they behave when they enter a certain page (how long they stay, where they click, how far they scroll, etc.).
Given that these scripts can also intercept personal information which may make users more vulnerable to identity theft, users should consider measures to block them, such as a secure browser.