Jeremy Tillman

At first blush, individuals may find it reassuring that their data is being collected and processed by faceless corporations rather than their neighbor next door, however, there are two caveats to this logic, he added. First, while your neighbor may not be personally collecting your data, he may very well be the data analyst working at the company that does. In other words, there are distinct individuals within each company whose entire job is to analyze, evaluate, and interact with user data. Ten or more trackers that collect personal data were found on 21.3 percent of the sites covered by the study. CUNNING MALWARE SPREADS, GOES AFTER YOUR BANK ACCOUNT Google Analytics and Facebook Connect are some of the most prominent trackers, according to Ghostery. Google Analytics is in the top ten of the most widely used trackers based on the various services the Internet giant uses, including Google Analytics and Google Analytics Adsense. Facebook Connect is next with three. Google Analytics was found on almost half of all loaded pages at 46.4 percent, while Facebook Connect was on more than a fifth, coming in at 21.9 percent. Other companies that showed include comScore and Twitter. And Google Analytics’s not easy keeping tabs on these trackers since many are n’t installed by the website owner, according to Jeremy Tillman.