How Tech Giants Track You Across the Web ⇥ bbc.com
Thomas Germain, BBC News:
TikTok keeps track of everything you do on its app – no surprises there. What’s less obvious is how the company follows you around other parts of the internet that have nothing to do with TikTok.
This article is a good introduction to the problem of tracking pixels, but its focus on TikTok feels like off-base when it is nowhere near the biggest offender. Germain, later in the same article:
If you’re concerned about these individual websites you’re missing the point. Critics say the issue is that large tech companies like TikTok are increasingly following everything you do online. According to DuckDuckGo, a privacy company, TikTok has trackers on 5% of the world’s top websites. That number has grown steadily, though it’s nothing compared to Google with trackers on almost 72% of top websites and Meta at about 21%.
If more people realize their browsing is being tracked so exhaustively by these three companies — plus Amazon tracking visitors to something like 17% of top websites — that is a good thing. The focus on the villain du jour, though, seems misguided when you realize Bytedance is less prevalent in DuckDuckGo’s tracking tool than dozens of adtech companies you probably have not heard of.
That said, it still happens and using pixels for data collection across sensitive industries has caught out some big players in the past. Several healthcare, telehealth companies, and health insurance giants have in recent years fallen foul of federal privacy laws by sharing in some cases millions of users’ private information with ad giants. In 2024, I exclusively reported for TechCrunch that the website of the U.S. Postal Service was also sharing the private home addresses of logged-in users with Meta, LinkedIn, and Snap. USPS curbed the practice after I alerted the postal service to the security lapse.
This stuff should be impossible. Not illegal, or merely punishable after the fact — there should be no way for this to happen. And, no, I am not proposing a technical solution like some kind of stricter filtering.