Blacklight, A Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector, from The Markup, whose slogan is:
“Big Tech Is Watching You. We’re Watching Big Tech.” has been Updated With New Tracker Lists, stating “Our website scanner can now warn you about additional companies that are tracking you.” – May 31, 2023
https://themarkup.org/blacklight/2023/05/31/blacklight-updated-with-new-tracker-lists
A very informative article introducing the Blacklight Inspector titled:
“I Scanned the Websites I Visit with Blacklight, and It’s Horrifying. Now What?” gives good information about this free Privacy Tool:
https://themarkup.org/the-breakdown/2020/09/22/i-scanned-the-websites-i-visit-with-blacklight-and-its-horrifying-now-what
“The Markup recently launched Blacklight, a free, instant privacy-inspection tool. Enter any website, and it reveals how you may be tracked when you visit the site, names the companies receiving your data, and explains what the trackers are doing—some of them watch your every mouse move and record your every keystroke. Trust us, it’s more than you’re expecting, raising the question: What can you do about it?”
They recommend browser extension add-ons: Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin which are very popular, among others, including Disconnect.me.
Below is a direct link to the Blacklight inspector webpage where anyone can enter a website address and wait 30 to 60 seconds to see a detailed list of all the trackers the the free scan has found. A scan of the AskWoody website found – Blacklight Inspection Result:
“Blacklight detected 1 third-party cookies on this site. Blacklight detected a cookie set for PayPal, Inc., and We found this website capturing user keystrokes. On the site you are inspecting, information entered in the email field was logged. Blacklight detected a script loaded from askwoody.com doing this on this site. However… There are other reasons for key logging, such as providing autocomplete functionality. Blacklight cannot determine the intent behind the inspected website’s use of this technique.”
Blacklight website offers this caveat: “Blacklight results should not be taken as the final word on potential privacy violations by a given website. Rather, they should be treated as an initial automated inspection that requires further investigation before a definitive claim can be made.”
For comparison, because AskWoody is extremely clean, I used Blacklight to check the USA Today news website and found a much different outcome, where USA Today had 63 Ad Trackers and 97 Third-party cookies were found, with a long list of “ad-tech companies this website interacted with“, check out this list of Ad Tech companies, who knew there were so many?
For some reason the Reader’s Digest website times out with a message saying there is an issue with Blacklight, please try again later. So this indicates that sometimes some websites will not be able to be scanned. I have this Blacklight website Bookmarked along with VirusTotal for quickly checking unfamiliar and possibly suspicious websites. Give it a try –
Visit the Blacklight Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector and enter some of your favorite websites just to learn a little about what and who is tracking.
https://themarkup.org/blacklight
