AutoTracko · Data Investigation
News Sites Rely
on American Surveillance Tech
After scanning 49 news organizations across 20 countries and measuring every tracker call made when loading their front pages, one finding was unmistakable: surveillance-driven advertising is essentially universal in online news. Across all countries, 65% of all tracker calls route through US-based corporations, regardless of where the news site or reader is located. Select your country below to explore how this affects you.
Data collected March 2026 · Methodology on GitHub · Motivation
Finding 01: Prevalence
Trackers are nearly universal in online news
sites have at least one tracker
That's 98%.
tracker calls detected
Across a single page load on each of the 49 sites.
average trackers per page
Range: 0 to 323 trackers per site.
Every time you load a news article, dozens of third-party services receive a signal about your visit: your browser, your location, your device, your time of visit. This isn't a minor inconvenience. It's commercially valuable surveillance data. As a 2026 EFF investigation found, US Customs and Border Protection purchased precise location data derived directly from ad networks, with no warrant required. The data collected while you read the morning news can reach government agencies through routes that bypass basic legal protections.
Personal data is transferred across the globe
Finding 02: Your Country
See the data from your perspective
Select your country to see which sites we scanned, how many trackers they carry, and how much of your data routes through US corporate infrastructure. Defaults to Canada.
Finding 03: Rankings
Every site ranked by tracker count
Selected country Other countries
About the tracker identification
Tracker classification in this study is based on the DuckDuckGo Tracker Blocklist dataset, a curated, regularly maintained list of known tracking domains and their owners. License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Source: github.com/duckduckgo/tracker-blocklists
Three sites were excluded because they blocked automated scanning: usatoday.com, lefigaro.fr, and japantimes.co.jp.
Finding 04: Country comparison
Germany uses 66× fewer trackers than Canada
Average tracker count per site, by country of the news organization. Your selected country is highlighted in red.
European outlets, particularly German and French news sites, show that quality journalism doesn't require surveillance-level data collection. German news sites averaged just 1.7 trackers per page, while Canadian sites averaged 110. The difference isn't technical; it's a policy and business model choice.
Finding 05: Ownership
Almost all of it flows through American tech companies
% of all sites use Google's ad network
Google LLC appears on 45 of 49 sites scanned.
% of all tracker calls route through US companies
Including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Adobe and others.
Top tracker owners across all 49 sites:
US-headquartered companies are shown in blue. Non-US companies are shown in gray.
The top tracker owners are all headquartered in the United States. For readers outside the US, this creates a structural problem: the publisher's country privacy law governs what the news site can do with your data, but the tracker companies receiving that data operate under US law. Once data crosses that border, different rules apply.
What They Actually Collect
Ad networks build detailed profiles, and Google leads the pack
It's worth being specific about what these tracker calls actually collect. Google operates the world's largest advertising network, appearing on 84% of the sites in this study. Their privacy policy is unusually explicit about the scope of data collected, even for users who are not signed in.
From Google's Privacy Policy · policies.google.com
Even without a Google account, browsing is tracked via device identifiers:
"When you're not signed in to a Google Account, we store the information we collect with unique identifiers tied to the browser, application, or device you're using. This allows us to do things like maintain your preferences across browsing sessions, such as your preferred language or whether to show you more relevant search results or ads based on your activity."
Activity collected may include:
- Terms you search for
- Videos you watch
- Views and interactions with content and ads
- Voice and audio information
- Purchase activity
- People with whom you communicate or share content
- Activity on third-party sites and apps that use Google's services
- Chrome browsing history synced with your Google Account
On location data:
"We collect location information when you use our services … [including] GPS and other sensor data from your device, IP address, Activity on Google services, such as from your searches or places you label like home or work, Information about things near your device, such as Wi-Fi access points, cell towers, and Bluetooth-enabled devices."
Google and networks like it build detailed profiles of your interests, location patterns, political leanings, and purchasing behaviour without you holding an account anywhere. Every tracker call adds to that profile.
That data sits in US corporate infrastructure. The CLOUD Act (2018) allows US authorities to compel American tech companies to hand over data stored anywhere in the world, without notifying the person affected. The PATRIOT Act enables collection of records from virtually any holder of data under national security letters that carry gag orders. In documented cases, US agencies have simply purchased the data commercially, skipping legal process entirely. The publishers embedding this code are subject to their own country's privacy law; the infrastructure receiving the data is not.
Finding 06: Categories
It's mostly advertising, but there's more
Over 76% of all tracker calls are classified as advertising or ad-motivated tracking. But a meaningful share falls into analytics, audience measurement, and fraud detection, indicating these sites are running a full-stack data operation on every visitor.
Not all third-party services are equal
Some domains in this dataset are Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), services like cdn.jsdelivr.net that host shared libraries and assets to make websites load faster. CDNs
can provide utility and aren't inherently tracking services, though their
prevalence across the web means they can still observe browsing patterns at
scale.
Others occupy a grey zone. fonts.googleapis.com serves web fonts, a real service, but it is operated by Google, a company
that uses cross-site signal data to enrich its advertising network. The font
request itself tells Google which site you visited and when. Utility and surveillance
can coexist in the same domain. The large news organizations in this dataset
likely have the infrastructure and technical capacity to self-host these assets
if they chose to, removing the dependency on Google entirely.
Finding 07: The exception
One site proved it doesn't have to be this way
Most trackers (CA)
trackers on National Post
The highest Canadian count in the dataset.
The Guardian's reader-supported revenue model means it doesn't depend on ad networks to survive. It also operates under a unique trust structure, the Scott Trust, designed specifically to safeguard editorial independence and enable the organization to stand on values other than maximizing advertising revenue. National Post's aggressive tracker count reflects a business model that monetizes audience data as a primary revenue stream. The technology is the same; the choice is different.
Explore the data
See the trackers on any site in the study
Select a domain to see every tracker detected, who owns it, and what it does.