Communications of the ACM
Websites Have Way More Trackers Now
The average social media site was found to contain 160 trackers.
Credit: Crystal Eye Studio/Shutterstock
Analysts at Panama-based virtual private network company NordVPN found the average website has 48 trackers monitoring visitors' activity and recording their private data, elevating the risk of identity theft.
The analysts calculated the number of trackers across the 100 most popular websites in 25 countries.
The heaviest users are social media websites, each of which contain 160 trackers on average; health sites feature an average of 46 trackers each, while digital media sites have an average of 28 trackers, and adult content and government sites have one and four trackers per site, respectively.
Most trackers are owned by recognizable third parties including Google, Facebook, and Adobe, which frequently use the collected data for marketing purposes.
NordVPN's Daniel Markuson said website trackers are fewer in countries with strong data-protection laws.
From TechRadar
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2022 SmithBucklin, Washington, DC, USA
No entries found