Tracking data via Blacklight

[nniiicc]

Given a list of URLs from political candidates we want to

• Analyze the tracking that occurs on each site.
• The Markup built a helpful tool to do just this
• • You can read about the methodology here https://themarkup.org/blacklight/2020/09/22/how-we-built-a-real-time-privacy-inspector
• • And play around with a GUI here https://themarkup.org/blacklight

There is a command line tool we can use to develop reports for political candidates

• https://github.com/the-markup/blacklight-collector

[peiwenf]

@nniiicc Here is the script that I found in the blacklight-collector repository that might doing the counting work https://github.com/the-markup/blacklight-collector/blob/main/src/parser.ts#L45 And I believe here is where they fit in data https://github.com/the-markup/blacklight-collector/blob/383eb2fbafa5e17585c2f0b1e6976cade91e3ecf/__tests__/parser.ts#L15

Here is the JSON file the black light collector produce https://github.com/peiwenf/campaign-access-eval/blob/main/inspection.json And this is the result I got for the same link on their website, which is surprisingly different. My guess is that the website only scans the base page while the json file contains three subpages. https://themarkup.org/blacklight?url=reg.recreation.uw.edu

Here is the script that Tor Browser Friendliness project calculating their score https://github.com/askumar2903/tor_browser_friendliness/blob/main/src/score-calculation.ts

And here is the link to the drop box folder I created https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/4619d5qiknngk0njjgbgj/h?dl=0&rlkey=g3s6xbmu2i6nl3b7r5fb5kvgu

[peiwenf]

@nniiicc Here is the black light collector reports generated by the Github Action, which are three examples from the attorney general data frame

• https://github.com/peiwenf/blacklight-collector/blob/main/examples.zip

And here is a description for the JSON file

• https://github.com/the-markup/blacklight-collector#inspection-result

I believe we are most interested in the inspection.json

Questions about the next step:

• I have written a script to count the number of appearances per tracker type and was wondering if we want other information like the name of the third-party trackers.
• Do we only care about the candidates that have a campaign website for this research question? I was unsure if we have decided on the specific research questions.