Plotting Trackers
January 2016
In collaboration with Jelle Reith and Oscar van Leest
On a lot of websites you visit third-party trackers are active. Trackers collect information about your online behaviour to create a profile of you that can be sold to advertisers or used for other purposes.
We wanted to emphasize that a lot of trackers are active on multiple websites rather than the fact that some websites have a lot of trackers. It is because of this that personal profiles can be very accurate.
We made a wifi access point anyone can connect to, consisting of a Raspberry Pi connected to a pen plotter. This man-in-the-middle device scans all websites people visit and puts them through a database. If a website is in the database we plot the name of its trackers. Every time a tracker appears in the browsing behaviour a circle is plotted around its name. This way a map is created that shows the presence of the trackers.