Who’s Tracking You? Use This New Service to Find Out

It can be daunting to determine who’s responsible for showing ads on the websites we visit, or who’s harvesting data from the mobile apps we use every day. That information is already semi-public, but it is not easily parsed and traditionally much of it has remained walled away in the hands of large advertising platforms. Not anymore: A powerful and free new service called DecryptAds scrapes and correlates this adtech data and makes it simple to quickly learn a great deal about the entities that are tracking you. A Decryptads summary of the advertising partnerships declared by espn. com. The newly launched decryptads. com says it is constantly scraping the files that websites and apps make publicly available to disclose the companies that are permitted to run ads or collect user data. These files include: –ads. txt: all of the adtech companies and data brokers that may run ads or harvest data from the site; –app-ads. txt: entities that can harvest data from or display ads on mobile and smart TV apps; –buyers. json/sellers. json: the entities buying, selling or reselling ad inventory for a given site or app. Zach Edwards is chief research officer for DecryptAds and a threat researcher at the security company Infoblox. That data broker information is gradually becoming available because four states — California, Oregon, Texas and Vermont — have recently passed laws requiring data brokers to register if they buy or sell data on consumers from those states. DecryptAds reports that almost half of those data brokers are collecting geolocation data from espn. com visitors who aren’t blocking ads, while another three disclose that they collect device fingerprints and sensitive personal information. A visual representation of the complex ad supply chain declared by espn. com. HIGH-RISK AD PARTNERS DecryptAds also makes it easy to learn the beneficiaries and national origins of the advertising firms lurking in apps and websites, displaying a conspicuous warning when adtech partners of an app or website are based in “geo-risk” areas like China and Russia, or in countries with strong financial and political ties to both — such as Cyprus and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). According to DecryptAds, espn. com works with four different advertising entities that are based in either Russia, China or the UAE, including the adtech firm Between Digital, which lists a New York address. However, the dossier on Between Digital flags them as a Russian firm, showing that their publisher offers (PDF) are processed through Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest private commercial bank and one of several financial institutions placed under U.