• Embedded a Youtube video? You’re helping Google track your website visitors
• Using Google Analytics? You’re helping Google track your website visitors
• Using Google’s Captcha tool to limit spam form submissions? You’re helping Google track your website visitors
• Embedded a Tweet? You’re helping Twitter track your website visitors. Yes, the example below is helping Twitter track you.
• Embedded a Facebook feed? You’re helping Facebook track your website visitors

Essentially, any third party code you place on your website allows that code provider to track your website visitors. You never see that data. It simply gets whisked away to that provider in exchange for the benefit of using that snippet of your code on your own website. 

When it comes to free tools, nothing is as it seems. Those free tools are paid for with your website visitors’ data. They use that data to help their advertisers better target ads to them. This huge amount of data, collectively, is very valuable.

One of the great things about BannerOS is that there are 0 third party tools required for things like form capture spam filtering, detailed visitor analytics and many feature rich tools from blogging to email marketing to ecommerce where the only company collecting data on your visitors is you.

Politicians love ripping into Facebook for privacy issues. But 81 US senators and 176 members of the House use an invisible piece of Facebook tech, called a pixel, that tracks when you visit their websites and shares this info back with Facebook. https://t.co/5rx46TmevQ

— WIRED (@WIRED) June 27, 2019

Using the Brave website browser, you can easily see how many third party plugins are leaking data. Simply use the browser and visit a website. In the top right corner of the browser’s window, you can click on the Brave icon to see the number of third party trackers that were blocked. 

Visit the BannerView.com home page and you’ll see that is a big fat 0. Of course, there are pages within the website where even we have some third party tools embedded. Specifically, this blog page with the embedded Tweet lets Twitter track you and on our video tutorials pages we have some embedded Youtube help videos that allow Google to track you.

In some cases, there’s simply no way to completely avoid this scenario, but the fewer third party tools you use, the better for your website’s overall privacy commitment to its visitors. Take a look at the example below:

On the home page of a simple property management website, there was a whopping 42 third party trackers blocked when visited using the Brave browser! I mean come on, 42 data leaks on a single website? I guarantee the owner of that website had no clue their website is a data goldmine for third parties! For your protection, I’m not including a link to that website.

If that still doesn’t concern you, maybe this does: Facebook and Google know what porn you're watching, even when you're in incognito.

Or, maybe legal liability is what will scare you straight! Companies embedding Facebook’s “Like” button can be held liable for collecting the data in Europe.

Ultimately, maybe you don’t really care about privacy or that of your users. Or maybe we’re simply biased because we’ve developed a website platform in BannerOS that doesn’t leak your customers’ data inadvertently out of the box. Either way, at least you can find out where you and the websites you regularly visit stand and take the appropriate action to protect both yours and your website visitors’ data.