She said she only allowed three trackers on spartapride.org: cookies from Twitter and Facebook that accompany their “like” buttons on the site, and one from Disqus, a commenting platform she got through a prepackaged website theme she bought off the internet for $59 to build the site.
But when The Markup scanned spartapride.org using our new instant privacy inspector, Blacklight, we found 21 different ad-tech companies tracked visitors to the site, sending possible signals about people’s gender identities to advertisers—without the users’ knowledge or consent.
Among them were the marketing and advertising arms of Google, Amazon, and Oracle’s BlueKai consumer data division, which reported a massive data exposure this summer, leaving billions of records—including personally identifiable information—accessible to the open internet without a password. Oracle did not respond to questions about whether data gathered from spartapride.org’s users was included in the exposure.
The trackers loaded because Disqus sells ads on the free version of its commenting portal, and that ad space comes with third-party tracking. Disqus discloses those
— source themarkup.org | Aaron Sankin, Surya Mattu | Sep 22, 2020