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Comment by 16s | Hacker News Reader

All the includes are insane as well. Run Noscript or any other JS blocker and visit a few big sites and you'll see that you end up running JS from half the Internet.

I'm joking of course, but some sites have dozens of includes from other sites, advertisers, CDNs, etc.

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I installed Ghostery but did not set up any filters; with just that, it shows how much external resources / from which external parties things are loaded. Some sites have like twenty external dependencies, and multiple analytics gathering scripts (which may get embedded via the iframes of advertisers).

I work in advertising. I have seen Ghostery rack up close to 300 trackers before. Piggybacked pixels... they're everywhere

How does one even collect the data from 300 trackers?

Your 300 affiliate marketing partners run software from their affiliate network which automatically analyzes their tracking pixel server logs to determine how far the traffic they steered made it through your purchase process based on the pixels they requested (unique for each page) and the unique ID in their cookies. Then, their affiliate network collects the sales commissions and pays out the affiliate partners.

Ah, gotcha, that makes more sense. I was like, 300 individual sites with individual tracking on what page, what the, how the, etc. Thanks for the clarification!

TechCrunch is the worst I've seen. 13 for me. Any other higher ones?

How many trackers are detected by Ghostery on individual articles on these sites?

Boing Boing has 12.

The Atlantic has 13.

Huffington Post has 16.

The Onion's AV Club has 18.

Wired has 19.

Media sites are painful to visit with so many libraries and embedded widgets. Those pages load much faster after using Noscript to selectively load JS. Wish there was a built in repository where people could share whitelists.

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