When browsing the Internet, our data may be exposed. There are many techniques they can use to collect information from users. After all, they have great value on the net, as we know. They can be used to include us in spam campaigns, send targeted advertising or even sell them to third parties. In this article we are going to talk about Blacklight , a free tool that allows us to know what a website we visit collects.
Privacy when browsing, a very important factor
Keep in mind that privacy is very important for Internet users. Protecting our data , the information in short, is vital. However, simply by visiting a page, by using an online service, they can be exposed.
Luckily we can make use of different tools and settings to protect ourselves on the network. We can prevent our data from being exposed, which may even affect the proper functioning of the systems.
The fact that they collect data can be very negative if they use it to impersonate our identity, for example.
We are going to talk about Blacklight , which is a tool that allows us to know everything that a website we visit knows about us. Everything that website could collect.
Blacklight, a tool to know what a website collects
What Blacklight does is scan websites for any data trackers they may have. All this is done for free and in a short time. Keep in mind that most websites have trackers, although not all of them are bad and will harm us. For this reason, it is sometimes convenient to know exactly what you collect from us to determine whether or not it may affect us.
Trackers can be data, ads, third-party cookies, send information to social networks such as Facebook, etc. In short, they are trackers that are linked to other services that collect information from users, from those who visit those web pages.
We can say that Blacklight acts as a web page privacy inspector . Reveal everything that they can collect through browsing. In addition, we can obtain this information quickly and easily, as well as see it visually.
It should be noted that Blacklight is simple and easy to use. All we have to do is visit their website and enter the URL of the page that we want to search to detect possible data trackers. When we do that, we’ll see that it takes a few seconds (usually between 30 seconds and a minute) to scan all the active data trackers on that website and then list them by categories.
This tool shows us the results it detects on that specific date and time . We can click on each category to get more information. It tells us, among other things, the frequency of these trackers and where they are configured.
In the example we have done, Blacklight shows us that there are 9 ad trackers, 3 that send third-party cookies and also tells Facebook that we have visited the page. The latter is something that is present in many sites, and is that the pages share this type of information with social networks such as Facebook.
If we click on each of the parameters that we mention, it shows us more information. It explains, for example, what it means to share data with Facebook. One more way for users to have extensive knowledge about what they are visiting and how they manage their data.
In short, Blacklight is an online platform , a totally free tool that we can use to learn more information about the sites we visit. It shows us how they could track us. As we say, crawlers are not always going to affect us negatively, as many of them act to make sites work better. However, it is convenient to analyze them in case there is something strange that can damage our privacy.
