Blacklight, a website privacy inspector.
02 Oct 2020[This is more last week I learned …] about a new tool called Blacklight. The gist of Blacklight is,
Who is peeking over your shoulder while you work, watch videos, learn, explore, and shop on the internet? Enter the address of any website, and Blacklight will scan it and reveal the specific user-tracking technologies on the site—and who’s getting your data. You may be surprised at what you learn.
Ok. So I tested this site (amytabb.com), and there was Google Analytics, and StatCounter. StatCounter has some cookies, and then Google Analytics show up as more highly invasive because of AdTech.
I had wanted to ditch Google Analytics anyway, and had already incorporated StatCounter. So I got rid of the Google Analytics code and tested again. Blacklight uses a cached version of your site, so it will take 24-48 hours for any changes to register (as the reporter who so helpfully wrote back indicated).
While this Blacklight creation a great tool for public sites – especially news sites – it may be more limited when it comes to sites where you have to log in (such as Facebook). Article here.