wearesold

See which data broker companies are buying and selling your personal information.

wearesold monitors network requests on every website you visit and flags connections to known data broker companies — the companies that aggregate, package, and sell your personal data. Unlike ad-tracker blockers that lump everything as "trackers", wearesold specifically names the data economy players in plain language: who they are, what type of broker they are, and what they do with your data. The popup shows a per-site verdict with a breakdown by broker type and company name. Everything runs in your browser. No data is collected, transmitted, or shared.

Part of the weare____ privacy tool series.

What it detects

• Consumer Data Brokers — Acxiom, Experian, LexisNexis, Spokeo, and others that aggregate and sell consumer profiles, people search results, and credit-adjacent data.
• Identity Resolution — Criteo, LiveRamp, The Trade Desk, ID5, and others that link your identity across devices and browsers so data brokers can build more complete profiles.
• Audience Data — Adobe Audience Manager, Salesforce DMP, Permutive, and others that package consumer segments for sale to advertisers.
• Data Marketplaces — Oracle BlueKai, Lotame, Nielsen, Eyeota, and others that operate exchanges where audience data is bought and sold in real time.

Install

Chrome

1. Go to chrome://extensions/
2. Enable Developer mode
3. Click Load unpacked → select chrome-extension/

Firefox

1. Go to about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox
2. Click Load Temporary Add-on → select firefox-extension/manifest.json

How it works

popup.html ←→ popup.js ←→ background.js ←→ webRequest API
                              (storage)     (network monitoring)

Component	Chrome (MV3)	Firefox (MV2)
Background	Service worker, chrome.webRequest.onBeforeRequest listener, matches requests against ~80 broker domains, stores results in chrome.storage.session, updates badge	Persistent background page, in-memory storage, browser.* API
Popup	Renders verdict + breakdown by broker type and company name	Same, browser.* promises

Project structure

wearesold/
├── chrome-extension/
│   ├── manifest.json      # MV3 manifest
│   ├── background.js      # webRequest listener + broker domain matching
│   ├── popup.html         # Popup shell
│   ├── popup.js           # Renders verdict + broker type/company breakdown
│   ├── styles.css         # Dark theme
│   └── icon{16,48,128}.png
├── firefox-extension/
│   ├── manifest.json      # MV2 manifest
│   ├── background.js      # Same logic, browser.* API
│   ├── popup.html
│   ├── popup.js           # Same UI, browser.* promises
│   ├── styles.css
│   └── icon{16,48,128}.png
├── store-assets/
│   ├── icon128-store.png  # Chrome Web Store icon (no alpha)
│   ├── screenshot-detected.png
│   └── screenshot-clean.png
├── CLAUDE.md
└── README.md

Design

• Pure vanilla JS — zero dependencies, no build step
• Local-only — nothing leaves the browser
• Dark theme matching the weare____ design language
• ~80 data broker domain mappings across 4 categories
• Network-layer detection via webRequest API — no content script needed
• Badge shows broker count per tab (red if brokers found, grey if clean)
• Sites with zero brokers show a hint that the site may collect data directly

Known limitations

• Domain list is bundled and static — not automatically updated
• Only detects brokers by known domains — cannot detect novel or white-label broker services
• Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection may block some broker requests before they're detected
• Sites that collect data directly (Google, Amazon, Reddit) show zero — they are the data collectors

License

Open source. Part of the weare____ series.