Who’s watching you the closest online? Google, duh

September 24, 2024 TH Author

Google, once again, is the “undisputed leader” when it comes to monitoring people’s behavior on the internet, according to Kaspersky’s annual web tracking report.

In its yearly roundup of who is keenest to follow an individual’s web movements — and their data — the now-banned-in-America security shop collected anonymous users’ statistics between July 2023 and June 2024 via its Do Not Track (DNT) plugin.

The software, built into all Kaspersky products but disabled by default, prevents trackers (cookies, tracking pixels, social media trackers, web analytics and device fingerprinting) from loading when users visit websites.

Privacy advocates don’t like these behavioral trackers and have long argued that the amount of user data they scoop up, store, and share is a massive privacy invasion that can incentivize surveillance and other real-world harms.

Website and app owners, meanwhile, insist they do more good than harm, and give visitors a more personalized experience.

During this 12-month span, Kaspersky’s DNT tool was triggered almost 39 billion times. Yes, that’s billion with a b. The exact number was 38,725,551,855.

Using this data, the Russia-based biz put together a list of 25 services that the anti-tracker detected more often across nine regions and certain individual countries.

“Eight tracking systems appeared in almost all of the TOP 25 lists for the regions we studied,” report authors Anna Larkina and Flavio Negrini said. “Four of these belong to Google.”

The four are: Google Display & Video 360, which monitors advertising-related activities like clicks and ad metrics; Google Analytics, which is a more general user behavior and keyword tracker; another ad-tracking system called Google AdSense; and YouTube Analytics, which hoovers up data about video views and audience engagement.

Google Display & Video 360 had the largest share among the Top 25 tracking systems in Asia, accounting for 25.47 percent of DNT triggers in South Asia and 24.45 percent in East Asia.

The smallest number of DNT triggers for this particular system came from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) with 8.38 percent.

Compared to last year’s report, Google Display & Video 360 slightly increased in East Asia and the CIS but dropped in other regions.

Similarly, Google Analytics slightly increased its East Asia (13.83 percent) and the CIS (9.36 percent) DNT triggers, but decreased in other regions. The top two regions for Google Analytics trackers are Latin America (14.89 percent) and the Middle East (14.12 percent), while the lowest percentage is in North America: 8.42 percent.

Google’s other ad tracker, AdSense, saw its largest share in the Middle East (6.91 percent) and South Asia (6.85 percent). The smallest shares occurred in Oceania (3.76 percent) and the CIS (2.30 percent)

And rounding out Google’s top 4 trackers: YouTube Analytics “notably” picked up snooping activity across all regions, we’re told. The most prevalent regions include South Asia (12.71 percent) and the Middle East (12.30 percent), while the smallest shares come from Europe (5.65 percent) and North America (4.56 percent).

Google did not immediately respond to The Register‘s inquiries.

A couple of other notable mentions from the report: San Francisco-based New Relic appeared for the first time and across all regions. Its web tracking focuses on performance analysis and detecting any website or application errors.

And finally, Microsoft trackers also appeared in all regional Top 25 lists, although these systems represent “a relatively small share” of each region’s most prevalent trackers. ®