Web tracking expanded sharply even while privacy laws and concerns grew.

Evidence

A team of researchers from the University of Washington led by Adam Lerner and Anna Simpson studied the growth of web trackers from 1996 to 2016. Not surprisingly from our point of view, web tracking increased in tandem with the rise and institutionalization of surveillance capitalism, as did third-party connections. The researchers note that although earlier trackers recorded routine data oriented toward product stability, the more recent rise in trackers is of those that capture and analyze personal information. In 2000 only about 5 percent of sites contacted at least five third parties, but by 2016, 40 percent of sites sent data to third parties. Among trackers with the “most power to capture profiles of user behavior across many sites,” google-analytics.com is cited as a “remarkable outlier,” gathering more data from more sites than any other entity does. The researchers conclude that despite the privacy concerns that have received so much attention in recent years, tracking has substantially expanded in “scope and complexity” on a clear upward trend line. In other words, there is more tracking now than at any time since the launch of the internet, even as citizens and governments try to protect individual privacy. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2015

Categorization

• XREF: Direct empirical evidence of the coup-from-within and the failure of privacy protections, central themes of the book.