Journalism is supposed to afflict the comfortable.
So we built an app for that.
Introducing Blacklight – a privacy tool that lets you scan any website and see how you are being surveilled. Built by the incomparable @suryamattu.
themarkup.org/blacklight/
@suryamattu Blacklight was born from a conversation @suryamattu and I had updating the privacy series “What They Know” that I led ten years ago at @wsj.
What did we find? The Tl;DR: surveillance has become creepier and more difficult to stop.
themarkup.org/blacklight/202…
@suryamattu @WSJ Using Blacklight, @ASankin found that some of the most sensitive websites on the Internet - banks, medical clinics, child safety – were sharing their users personal data with third parties.
SunTrust Bank was sending user passwords to a 3rd party!
themarkup.org/blacklight/202…
What can you do? @ASankin surveyed the options and found that one of the best things you can do to protect yourself is to stop using Google Chrome.
Firefox, Safari and Edge all offer better privacy protections.
themarkup.org/ask-the-markup…
@ASankin In case you were wondering: The Markup comes up totally clean on Blacklight!
This is the first time in my ten years of covering privacy that I have worked at a place that values data privacy.
All I had to do to get here was found the damn place! lol
As we always do, we have published a detailed methodology for how we built Blacklight, as well the code we used for collection and analysis.
github.com/the-markup/bla…
github.com/the-markup/bla…
github.com/the-markup/inv…
themarkup.org/blacklight/202…
Blacklight would not have been possible without the foundational privacy work and guidance we received from @s_englehardt, Gunes Acar, @random_walker, @jonathanmayer, @hoofnagle, @ashk4n and the team at @duckduckgo.
Thank you!
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