What tracking info websites gather on you

[Jason]

Since we've been talking about online privacy lately, I found this article that I thought might be helpful. It confirms a lot of concerns of our recent presenter, Arthur Edelstein of PrivacyTests.org. The article, "I Scanned the Websites I Visit with Blacklight, and Itââ,¬â,,¢s Horrifying. Now What?' from The Markup by Aaron Sankin, is illuminating. While it's a tad dated (September 2020), I don't think that much has changed since then. It doesn't just explain the problems and advantages with various browsers, it offers some solutions, too.

It refers to the Blacklight tool (from The Markup) that checks what websites are collecting on you. You're not required to visit the website. You enter the address and it accesses the website to analyze it. In the interest of full transparency, I checked our website. See the attachment for the results. Privacy Badger confirms the results.

However, the forum uses a track from gstatic.com related to Google (which Privacy Badger flags). Since I don't have any Google services on our website except the Captcha system, it must be that. It's to stop bots from registering accounts on our forum. Let me correct that, it tries to stop them. I still get a few every day. I don't know if this cookie actually collects any personally identifiable information about you. Does anyone know? And if so, are you concerned about this?