As part of a detailed study of pixels/trackers, an analysis of over 3,000 websites and over 100,000 associated webpages (using the client-side security scanning feature of Feroot Inspector) found pixels/trackers on 95% of their websites. Each website in the study corresponds to an unique organization (company, non-profit, or government agency). The high 95% reflects the extent of data harvesting that is done by marketing, advertising, and performance platforms today.
Pixels/trackers associated with these platforms are contained in the webpage code and automatically load into the browser when opening a webpage. Once the webpage is loaded, the pixels/trackers start collecting and transferring user-related data from the user end, often including data entered by the user into the user’s browser.
The analysis also determined that an average of 13 unique pixels/trackers were present across all the webpages of the websites analyzed. Table 1 gives the breakdown of the pixel/tracker present in websites by the sectors studied.
Figure 1 shows Google is the absolute dominant collector of client-side data at 92% present on websites across all the sectors studied. Microsoft, Facebook round up the Top 3. TikTok (ByteDance) related pixels/trackers at 7.41%.
Figure 1: Percentage of websites of with pixels/trackers – by sector & platform owner
Figure 2 shows the distributions of the number of pixels/trackers present on websites for each of the sectors studied. The overall average of the number of pixels/trackers across all sectors was 13.16
Figure 2: Distribution of percentage of analyzed websites over the number of pixels/trackers present
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