What are the most visited sites?

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Let's take inspiration from a beautiful infographic created by the always excellent site Visual Capitalist. We particularly like their site because they always manage to graphically demonstrate some things that would otherwise be difficult to fully understand. With today's example, in fact, they manage to immediately make people understand how immense the sprawling power of Google on the Internet. What are the most visited sites?

What are the most visited sites?

Click on the image to see it full screen.

If we didn't know everything we know about Google and company maybe we wouldn't even see anything wrong with all this. However, when we discover how sprawling Google is ¹ and how much data it collects about us ² the thing starts to become slightly more disturbing, don't you think?

Google and the others

The Google dominance it's impressive even when compared to other Big Tech like Facebook And Amazon. The data traffic generated by Google is, according to this infographic, superior to anything generated by Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Pornhub, eBay, Twitter, Zoom, Reddit, Netflix, Yahoo And Wikipedia.

We ask it with the utmost simplicity: it is normal and reassuring that the most visited company on the internet has almost advertising is the only source of income? And that its advertisements are not anonymous but result of aggregate and profiling data on our daily lives?

You may have recently heard of Google and of its privacy sandbox to protect our privacy. Building a privacy-first future for web advertising, they say. Unfortunately it is a very unbelievable slogan as we know Google has filled the web with tracers. Sooner or later we will try to make a summary article on this too, for now we recommend you read this in-depth study from the ANDelectronic Frontier Ffoundation.

What are the most visited sites? The Markup analysis

Second this analysis Of The Markup, carried out in September 2020, we see that thanks to their tool Blacklight they discovered many interesting things:

• The 74% of the sites analyzed use some technology Google for user tracking.

• The 50% use Google Analytics with the remarketing function.

• The 6% use the Fingerprinting to never lose sight of the target (the Browsers Brave, if you're interested, has the block Fingerprinting integrated).

Now they tell us that online advertising must be revised, but they always have to dictate the rules, of course.

And with Facebook It's certainly not much better

• The 33% of the sites analyzed use technologies from Facebook to track users.

• The 30% uses the famous tracking pixels of Facebook.

We don't add anything else because we think these numbers speak for themselves.

Help us make the web a better place by asking developers not to always only use the technologies of these Big Techs because we know that alternatives exist. For example minus Google Analytics And more Matomo to start.

What we want to explain to you with the project TheAlternatives, in fact, is that all this is neither necessary nor mandatory and, in our opinion, not even right.

Until things improve, defend yourself using tools like Brave or Firefox to navigate (or Bromite on Android) and sites like Exodus Privacy And Blacklight to discover who exchanged your data and your privacy for a goose that lays golden eggs.

1. Google products on Wikipedia[↩]
2. Are you ready? Here is all the data Facebook and Google have on you[↩]

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