In January of this year we kicked off our Pixel Hunt project in collaboration with Mozilla Rally. This project is the first large scale crowdsourced study into how Meta tracks people across the internet using their tracker. Today we are publishing our first story. 🧵
1/ .@colinlecher and I found that studentaid.gov sent financial aid applicants’ personal data to FB. For those not in the US, this is the site where students need to go to apply for help affording college. themarkup.org/pixel-hunt/202…
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We’ve spent the last ten months building #CitizenBrowser, a project that aims to peek inside the Black Box of social media algorithms, by building a nationwide panel to share data with us. Today, we are publishing our first story from the project. /1 .@corintxt crunched the numbers and found that after Facebook flipped the switch for political ads, partisan content elbowed out reputable news outlets in our panelists’ news feeds. themarkup.org/citizen-browse… /2

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.

Facebook wasn't happy that we built a tool to let users collect their own 'People You May Know Data'
gizmodo.com/facebook-wante… We carried out an investigation into the PYMK algorithm and found some pretty wild stuff. You can read the stories we wrote here gizmodo.com/tag/people-you…