New data and trackers in our monthly update.
We've updated the site today with data collected during December 2017. This month, like last month, we have collected tracking data from around 100 million new page loads.
There were again several new entrants into the top 600 trackers list. Here are some interesting ones:
cloudfront.net
and amazonaws.com
domains are being used, which makes it difficult to attribute the entities behind these requests as they are hiding behind domains registered to Amazon. AWS makes it easy to serve Cloudfront and other AWS services from other domain names, a practice which should improves transparency around whose content is being loading into pages.summerhamster.com
domain, including chip.de and faz.net.adx1.com
domain. However, tracing this domain back to the service which it is part of was non-trivial: The domain itself is registered to a company called 'Platform Inc.'. With such a generic company name, we were not able to find a home page for this company. However, continued searching for the adx1.com
domain yielded documentation for admachine which instructs developers to use an API on this domain. Furthermore the page has a copyright notice for Platform.IO who in turn has © 2017 Platform Inc.
on their page. The need for this kind of investigation is common when trying to match tracker domains to companies and services, and the transparency of tracker ownership in general is a major issue.The average number of trackers on top websites remained largely constant from November to December 2017, at 10. The largest increase in number of trackers for a site was by spox.com with 8 more on average than last month. Freenet.de and rakuten.de also registered increases of 7 and 6 respectively. 01net.com and dailymail.co.uk registered the largest decreases in trackers, but both started from very high bases of over 20 trackers per page.