The Many Hands of the Internet

Last week’s post discussed the invisible hand of middleware: allowing two applications to communicate with each other. Similarly, visiting a website does not yield only tangible results. Many third parties are also contacted, as they have a stake in the information and usage you are sharing.

While speaking about invisible hands can only go so far, I decided to actually take a look at how many parties were contacted when I visited typical websites. An extension found on Mozilla Firefox — called Lightbeam — allowed me to witness every third party website that is contacted while visiting websites such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

After around 30 minutes of browsing the web, this is what Lightbeam gave me:

It may look confusing, but the breakdown is pretty simple. The circle bubbles are websites that I physically entered, whereas the triangle bubbles are third party websites that participated in my visit without my knowledge. The larger the circle bubble, the more it attributed to sharing of my information and usage with third parties.

Without exactly deciphering who the third parties are, it’s telling how many triangle bubbles there are. I visited 13 websites in total, but somehow managed to connect with 91 third party websites!

91 third party websites! That’s an average of exactly 7 third party websites per host website. While not every website is as guilty as the next, it’s an astounding number regardless.

A closer examination of Lightbeam’s list outlines the main culprits:

The list above outlines which websites were actually visited and how many third party sites were subsequently contacted. While the number of third party connections was 91, there’s a lot of overlap and chains to be found in the numbers on the right side of the list.

Two important things can be noted from the above list: 1) Kotaku and The Score seem to be the most heavily connected primary party in my brief search history, and 2) Google has its hands on everything.

Kotaku (a gaming website) and The Score (a sports website) were the major culprits of my third party browsing connections. It’s interesting to note that those websites generally receive less information than social media websites. I probably stayed on either website no longer than two minutes each. Social media websites, while capturing the most information from the user, also typically have the most sustained usage.

While Kotaku and The Score are leading the third party connection race with 42 and 20 sites connected respectively, it’s actually refreshing to know that the prominent social media websites (Facebook and Twitter) are more secure with their connections. With that being said, it could possibly be that organizations like Facebook and Google are behind the third party connections, meaning their own websites would not need it to begin with.

Speaking of which… upon further examination, Google can be found everywhere. More than a few primary websites feed information and usage to Google. The leading third party website in terms of connections – DoubleClick – is actually a Google subsidiary. Google manages to reinforce its information reign through third party websites.

While many of the third party websites feeding onto primary websites are largely harmless, it’s always wise to consider who is receiving our information.