Datawrapper – “Considering the cookie consent banners that have come to grace our screens on a daily basis, it might not come as a surprise that companies are interested in extracting data from your online activities, and that browsing the internet is not exactly a private affair. Still, it is hard to grasp how this data collection actually happens and who is involved. In this post, I want to take a closer look at web tracking and the companies behind it. One website, many connections – When you visit a website, your web browser typically doesn’t just connect to the domain visible in the address bar, but to a variety of external services as well. Some of them might be required for the website’s basic functions, while others might serve advertisements, gather visitor statistics, or display embedded content from social media. All of these connections have one thing in common: They give the parties on the other side an opportunity to collect data. Those parties can also use a variety of mechanisms to tell your connection apart from others, including storing browser cookies, loading invisible images (“tracking pixels”), and generating unique fingerprints from your device- and system-specific settings. The chart below shows the tracking services that have been observed on some of the web’s most popular websites. (Along with the other charts in this post, this one uses data collected by Ghostery, an ad-blocking browser plugin, and published in the open-source tracker database WhoTracks.Me.)… Amazon’s 26 trackers, two thirds of which are used for advertising, already make up a considerable number. Yet it is not uncommon for websites to embed two, three, or even four times as many. Among the 100 websites most frequented by Ghostery users, the UK’s Daily Mail takes the top spot with a staggering 125 unique trackers observed…” +Google, YouTube, Fiverr, Reddit, Amazon, Facebook. X and Wikipedia!