Every moment you spend online, you are being tracked. Google, Facebook, Amazon and hundreds of other websites are cataloging every search term, mouse click and website visit. It may be difficult for ordinary people to understand. Many of these are legal, but some are not, and it can be difficult to parse the scale and illegality of what a company collects if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
WebXray is a new tool developed by former Google engineers who want to make it easier.
WebXray is a search engine that anyone can use to see exactly how a website is tracking you. A regular user can enter a text string, such as “cancer” or “pregnancy,” and see which sites are tracking that particular search, what cookies are being used, and what they are used for.
Women may look for information about pregnancy before getting tested or telling loved ones and then receive ads for strollers and formula. WebXray can tell you which sites provide this information to Google AdSense. People searching for porn on Open Browser may be surprised to find that their history is being cataloged and sorted by advertisers. Likewise, WebXray can tell you which websites are doing this.
The search engine is the brainchild of former Google engineer Tim Libert, who was deeply concerned about online privacy. He told Wired that he got the idea for WebXray while he was a graduate student studying cookies and advertising technology in the 2010s. He joined Google because he wanted to make the web a more private place for everyone, and thought he could do that more easily from within. But no success.
“I think I’ve lost the ability to be shocked, having seen it all,” he told Gizmodo in an email. “Perhaps the hardest thing to explain is actually how big it is, the amount of data, the amount of tracking, the details of billions of people’s lives running in a maze of remote servers. It’s all very sci-fi, and not in a good way!
Libert left Google two years later and returned to work at WebXray. New laws in Europe and the United States make many of the data-tracking practices by these sites illegal. The problem is that it’s very difficult to figure out how all this stuff works.
Lippert’s goal is in part to make it easier to find out which companies are tracking what so prosecutors and companies can better understand the situation.
“I think the most important thing to understand is that there are laws to protect online privacy, but regulators are at a disadvantage both in the U.S. and in Europe,” he told Gizmodo. “People should ask their politicians what the hell they’re having trouble with and increase their budgets. A regular state attorney general’s office simply doesn’t have the resources needed to enforce the law – even though politicians are happy to fund “enforcement divisions” to combat shoplifting , but corporate crime has been ignored.
For WebXray, litigation is part of the business plan. Lippert told Wired that he wants to be “the Henry Ford of tech litigation — turn it into a factory assembly line.” Anyone can use the tool to see how their search terms are being used, But it can go deeper. Everyone can make 25 free searches per day and access a simple list of every cookie used on the site.
Those who buy WebXray can get a more scientific and in-depth accounting of the privacy violations we live in. It’s perfect for a law firm looking to sue a company that violates an individual’s privacy, or a technology company trying to track down all the illegal cookies it doesn’t know about.
The website’s motto is “Privacy is inevitable.”
“I don’t think business practices that are outright rejected by the vast majority of Internet users can continue forever,” Lippert told Gizmodo. “We have more and more laws, more and more lawsuits, some succeed, some fail. But overall, we are moving in the right direction. The reason I started this company is I think we Can make it develop faster.
In 2023, Google claims it will eliminate third-party cookies entirely, in part because it needs to comply with stricter privacy laws. On Monday, Google withdrew from the program.
“A big issue that the media ignores is that no one sets more third-party cookies than Google, and part of the reason we created the search engine is so people can see this for themselves,” Lippert told us in an email Gizmodo . “If you visit the top cookies page, you’ll see that Google is way ahead of everyone else: https://webxray.ai/top_cookies.”
In an email to Gizmodo, Google disputed Libert’s claims.
“Respecting user privacy is our top priority, and it would be wrong to say otherwise,” a Google spokesperson said. “We design and build products with strong security and privacy features, including easy-to-use data management and deletion controls. . On the advertising side, Google is the first company to develop tools that allow people to view and adjust ad settings and even opt out of personalized ads entirely.
