Every moment you spend online, you’re being monitored. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and hundreds of other websites track every search term, every mouse click, and every website visit. It can be difficult for the average person to navigate. Much of this data is legal, but some of it isn’t, and if you don’t know what you’re looking for, it can be difficult to understand the scope and illegality of the data companies are collecting on you.
WebXrayA new tool created by a former Google engineer aims to make things easier.
WebXray is a search engine that anyone can use to see how, precisely, websites are tracking you. A normal user can type in a string of text, like “cancer” or “pregnancy,” and then see which websites are tracking that specific search, using which cookies, and what those cookies are for.
A woman may search for information about pregnancy before taking a test or talking to her loved ones, only to be served ads for strollers and baby formula. WebXray can tell you which websites gave this information to Google AdSense. People searching for porn on an open browser may be shocked to learn that their history is being cataloged and sorted by advertisers. Again, WebXray can tell you which sites do it.
The search engine is the brainchild of Tim Libert, a former Google engineer who was very concerned about privacy on the web. told WIRED He came up with the idea for WebXray while he was a graduate student researching cookies and ad tech in the 2010s. He joined Google because he wanted to make the web a more private place for everyone, and he thought he could do it more easily from the inside. It didn’t work out.
“I think I’ve lost my ability to be shocked, I’ve seen it all,” he told Gizmodo in an email. “Perhaps the hardest part to explain is the scale of this situation, the volume of data, the amount of tracking, the details of billions of people’s lives flowing through a maze of remote servers. It’s all science fiction, and not in a good way!”
Libert left Google after two years and returned to work on WebXray. New laws in Europe and the US have made much of the data tracking these websites do illegal. The problem is that it’s extremely difficult to understand how it all works.
Part of Libert’s goal was to make it easier to determine which companies are tracking what so that prosecutors and companies can be better informed.
“I think the key thing is to understand that there are already laws that protect online privacy, but regulators are overwhelmed, both in the US and in Europe,” he told Gizmodo. “People should ask their politicians why they’re not doing something and increase the budgets. A normal state attorney general’s office simply doesn’t have the resources to enforce the law — and while politicians are happy to give money to ‘law enforcement’ to fight shoplifting, corporate crime is ignored.”
For WebXray, lawsuits are part of the business plan. Libert told WIRED he wants to be the “Henry Ford of tech lawsuits, turning this site into an industrial assembly line.” Anyone can use the tool to see how their search terms are used, but there’s more to it. Everyone gets 25 free daily searches and access to a simple overview of every cookie used on the site.
People who pay for WebXray get a deeper, more thorough account of the privacy violations we all face. That’s perfect for a law firm trying to build a case against a company that’s violating people’s privacy, or a tech company trying to track down all the cookies it doesn’t know are breaking the law.
The site’s motto is “privacy is inevitable.”
“I think business practices that are rejected by the vast majority of people online can’t continue forever,” Libert told Gizmodo. “We have more and more laws and more and more lawsuits, some of them successful, some of them not. But overall, we’re moving in the right direction. The reason I started this company is because I think we can move things forward faster.”
By 2023, Google has said it will phase out third-party cookies altogether, in part because it needs to comply with stricter privacy laws. On Monday, Google withdrew from the plan.
“The major problem that the press has forgotten is that no one sets more third-party cookies than Google. Part of the reason we created this search engine was so people could see that for themselves,” Libert told Gizmodo in an email. “If you go to the cookies page, you’ll see that Google is way above everyone else: https://webxray.ai/top_cookies.”
In an email to Gizmodo, Google refuted Libert’s claim.
“Respecting user privacy is our top priority, and to pretend otherwise is false,” a Google spokesperson said. “We design and build our products with strong security and privacy protections, including easy-to-use controls to manage and delete data. When it comes to advertising, Google was the first company to create a tool that lets users see and adjust their ad settings and even opt out of personalized ads altogether.”
