The web is watching you. Chunks of code hide inside every website, tracking your online behaviour. Now, a pair of computer scientists have published their attempt to spy back. They audited 1 million of the most popular websites for tracking behaviours -more than anyone has looked at before. Their investigation gives new insight not only into what sites might know about you, but how they're figuring it out. Studying a million websites is hard. To do it, Arvind Narayanan -who heads the Web Transparency and Accountability Project at Princeton University - built a tool called OpenWPM with graduate student Steven Englehardt. OpenWPM can visit and log in to websites automatically, taking more than a dozen measurements of each one. It took two weeks to crawl through the top million websites, as ranked by web traffic firm Alexa.
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