We assign categories to some of the domains on our list based on the resources served by the domain, the domain's prevalence, and its privacy policy.
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| Action Pixels | This tracker may be collecting user specific events in a first-party or third-party environment. |
| Ad Fraud | The tracker is intended to help prevent ad fraud (either on behalf of the publisher or the network). These can come from a network (like Google) or ad middleware (software designed to identify bots and not show them ads). It should be assumed that most ad networks include this in their standard advertising javascript. It is rare that it is separate, but there are a few cases where ad fraud is separated from ad delivery and ad tracking and so it can be treated differently. |
| Ad Motivated Tracking | The tracking that takes place is related to advertising. This could include targeting users, header bidding, ad beacons, demographic collection, preventing ad fraud, etc. It may also include non-ad related technology if the motivation is still advertising related. For example, QuantServe by QuantCast looks at demographic information of visitors for websites. But they also act as a data broker for that data, selling it to ad networks. |
| Advertising | The purpose of this tracker is related to advertising. If the tracker is in "Ad Motivated Tracking", then it will nearly always be in this category. The exception is that advertising CDNs may be flagged under this category but do not necessarily constitute "Ad Motivated Tracking". In most cases, we cannot separate the CDN delivering the ad from the ad networks tracking, but it does exist in a few cases. |
| Analytics | The purpose of this tracker is analytics. These can be first-party, third-party, hosted, marketing analytics, web analytics, or any other reporting software. |
| Audience Measurement | Similar to analytics, but may focus on deeper demographics, behavior sets and specific actions. Examples in this category could be Nielsen measurement pixels, Tag Manager Systems, etc. |
| Badge | Denotes that the domain is used to serve "trust" badges. Websites typically use these to build trust with the user by showing that they are legitimate and that their data is collected through secure third-party service providers. Examples include antivirus badges from the likes of Norton and McAfee, and SSL badges that certify connections to the site are encrypted. |
| CDN | These domains are used primarily to load resources required for web pages to load correctly. |
| Embedded Content | Denotes that the domain is used to embed content into webpages. This covers video embeds like Youtube or Vimeo, audio embeds like spotify, and all forms of widgets like chat or contact forms etc. |
| Federated Login | Cross-system login buttons such as "Login with Facebook" on third-party sites. |
| Malware | The domain has been found to frequently serve malicious content (often referred to "malvertising"). While malvertising attacks impact the majority of ad networks, some are significantly worse than others. Types of malware include pop-up ads for deceptive downloads, drive-by downloads, malicious banners, and web widgets in which redirection can be co-opted into redirecting to a malicious site. |
| Non-tracking | Tracking is not the main goal. |
| Online Payment | Denotes that the domain is used to load online payment forms. |
| Obscure Ownership | Ownership of the third-party URL is hard, or impossible to identify. Taking steps to hide the ownership of a tracker is usually either for brand risk or malicious goals. |
| SSO | Single Sign On systems, such as logging in with your "Google Account" on Youtube and Gmail. |
| Session Replay | The domain is used to serve scripts that record visitors' journeys on websites. These scripts go beyond typical analytics libraries and track data such as mouse movement, clicks, taps, scrolls or even network activity. This data is compiled into videos for website owners to watch in order to see how users interact with the site. |
| Social Network | The domain is owned by a major social network. These domains are often used to serve embedded content (tweets, posts, stories) on third party sites, as well as oauth implementations (federated log in). |
| Social - Comment | Related to social commenting functionality. |
| Social - Share | Related to social sharing buttons powered by a third-party SDK. For example, Facebook's share buttons, or AddToAny's share button sets. This does not relate to self-built share buttons (i.e. on my own site, I upload a picture of Facebook's share icon, and hyperlink it to a sharing URL. This does not involve third-party data.) |
| Tag Manager | These domains are used primarily to load scripts (that is, tag management scripts) that then load additional resources on behalf of the site owner. The additional resources are usually tracking resources from third-party domains, even if the tag manager script itself often does not track the user. Sometimes tag managers are also used to load resources required for web pages to load correctly, for example, a tag manager may load a chat support widget. |
| Third-Party Analytics Marketing | Related to third-party analytics systems for marketing, usually marketing attribution or funnel management. On desktop this can include things like HubSpot, Marketo and Adobe. On mobile it could include attribution systems like branch.io Tag managers, A/B testing tools and personalization tools may also be included in this category. |
| Unknown High Risk Behavior | The purpose of the tracker cannot be identified. But if it is a widespread third-party URL, with a domain that does not resolve, and no description or documentation about its implementation can be found in a web search of the URL, then we can assume there is a low chance of it breaking sites and a high chance of user risk. We also flag expired domains here if they were once a legitimate tracker, as they still exist broadly on many sites and could be scooped up by new owners and used maliciously. |