Unveiling the hidden practices of the web: a new study by LINC on trackers and the advertising ecosystem

04 February 2021

Cookies and other trackers stored on a computer or smartphone are invisible to most users. The open source software CookieViz, developed by LINC and updated to carry out this study, lifts the veil on this invisible side of the web with a graph allowing to visualize the potential number of third parties having access to your navigation. 

 

LINC has analyzed the practices of the 1000 websites with the highest audience in France based on the Alexa, to better understand current practices in terms of tracers. By automatically performing this analysis from CookieViz, this study shows that a very large number of third parties (up to 79) can potentially have access to your browsing information, some of which may be able to track your online browsing on nearly half of the websites in the French Alexa Top 1000. Finally, this study shows that most of this tracking is done for advertising purposes.


The results of this work are available online :
>> Unveiling the hidden practices of the web <<


These results are fully reproducible by downloading CookieViz.