Today we’re releasing Blacklight, a real-time website privacy inspector that illuminates the hidden tracking technologies on any website (data detectives, assemble!). You can try it out yourself at: themarkup.org/blacklight
In our companion investigation ‘The high privacy cost of building a “Free” website, we show how common, free website-building tools offered by ad-tech companies lead to trackers loading on users’ browsers, often without the website operators’ knowledge or disclosure to users.
So why did I dedicate 18 months of my life to build Blacklight? It started as a conversation with @JuliaAngwin about how we might update her seminal ‘What They Know’ series on digital privacy from 2010.
Originally we planned to build a tool for internal reporting purposes only. However, as I started digging into the data we were collecting, the value of a public-facing tool became clear.
In our investigation, we found that more than 100 websites serving undocumented immigrants, domestic and sexual abuse survivors, sex workers, or LGBTQ people sent data about their visitors to advertising companies.
Some of the operators of these sites told us they knew about the tracking, but others said they were unaware of its pervasiveness. In both cases, it became clear to us that there was no easy way for the average person to know how the sites they visit track them.
Existing ad-blockers and privacy preserving browsers tend to block scripts and cookies that track users but do not highlight who wanted to get the data. When it comes to online tracking, we talk a lot about the data...
...and not enough about the companies that are deploying invasive practices to collect that data. Our tool shines a light on which companies are trying to get your data from a given website. Technology doesn’t build itself; we think it’s important to illuminate who builds it+why
At The Markup we talk a lot about giving our readers a sense of agency, not apathy, about the role technology plays in their lives.
Our goal with Blacklight is to do just that: to allow our readers to view the findings of our investigation through the lens of their own online habits, to see how the Ad tracking ecosystem is monitoring _them_.
Building Blacklight was a huge lift and took a village to realize. Contributors include: @SamMorrisDesign, @ASankin @elarrubia, @varlogsimon, Jill Jaroff, @yotammann and @chrisbdeaner.
And finally, Blacklight can only exist because of the foundational work that came before it. It would not have been possible to build this tool without the work and support of @s_englehardt, Gunes Acar, @random_walker, @jonathanmayer and the @DuckDuckGo Tracker Radar dataset.
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