Web Privacy Census shows tracking pervasive

University of California at Berkeley researchers will unveil a first-of-its-kind tool for measuring online tracking of consumers over time. The team has established the Web Privacy Census, a process for surveying top websites each quarter to evaluate the amount and kind of monitoring under way.

The goal is to create benchmarks to accurately evaluate the shifting methods of Internet marketers, ideally enabling a better informed debate over privacy policy. The census primarily serves as a baseline for comparison with future surveys. But even on its own, the report highlights the almost dizzying amount of online tracking that occurs. Here's what that means: If you visit a single popular site, companies you've never interacted with, whose names you don't know, are putting dozens of pieces of software onto your computer. If that strikes you as invasive and presumptuous, that's only because it is.