How Google and Facebook Track You
Promoted by DuckDuckGoGabriel Weinberg · FollowCEO/Founder DuckDuckGo. Co-author Super Thinking, Traction.Sep 21How does Google track me even when I’m not using it?
Google can (and does) track your activity across many non-Google websites and apps. That may be surprising, even if you already know that when you use Google products like Google Search, Chrome, and YouTube, they collect a shocking amount of personal information about you.
Google trackers are lurking behind most websites.
Google Analytics — a free Google service used by millions of websites and apps — is actually the biggest cross-site tracker on the Internet, lurking creepily behind the scenes on around 72.6% of the top 75k sites. While “analytics” sounds harmless and is in fact something websites need to improve their services, what’s happening underneath the hood with Google Analytics is anything but harmless or necessary.
Unlike privacy-focused analytics services, Google uses their Google Analytics tracker for more than just providing information about site visitors and app users to the sites and apps themselves. In many cases Google also adds that same information to Google’s own massive profiles about people. Since Google Analytics is embedded in so many sites, this tracker alone allows Google to see most people’s global browsing history, regardless of whether they use any Google products themselves.
The second biggest cross-site tracker is also Google’s: aptly named “Global Site Tag” and on around 60% of the top 10K websites. Most of the ads you see online on non-Google websites are actually still coming from Google, and this tracker helps track them. Google uses personal data from Google Analytics, Global Site Tag, and from their many other trackers and products, so they can target you with advertising and content they think you’ll want to see. While 72.6% of the top 75k sites contain Google Analytics, if you look at the full portfolio of Google trackers across those sites, 86.5% contain one or more of them.
