Michael - [email protected]

Expand the list: privacy, tracking, counter-tracking

## While reading about privacy in Fediverse: "You will still have to evaluate the tracking status of the server you are on and can't just rely on the software it uses" [[source]](https://blog.soykaf.com/post/privacy-and-tracking-on-the-fediverse/), one may realize that there is no service yet that checks the instances to see if they have third-party tracking cookies built in. Probably only a few instances will have any, this is also because the people in the Fediverse itself are very aware of tracking and privacy in general, and most would certainly agree with that. One may conclude that this tracking of instances should be made visible. Sure, we nerds can check it simply with our tools and browser add-ons like uBlock Origin, but users are partly here in fediverse because they don't want to be in environments where they will be rated, analyzed, become a product or capital of a company again. So if we take a look at the instance mentioned in the literature, we can get these results through an analysis. With a [webbkoll check of pawoo.net](https://webbkoll.dataskydd.net/de/results?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpawoo.net#requests) we can make this visible: **Pawoo.net** [(Pixiv on wikipedia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixiv) uses third-party Cookies like: * Google Analytics * InfoCheetah ("Content analysis of Internet data, interpreting consumer ratings and converting them into useful business information, improve marketing effectiveness" [[source]](https://www.infocheetah.com/)). [Webbkoll](https://webbkoll.dataskydd.net/de/) is "an online tool that checks how a webpage is doing with regards to privacy". It's [backend](https://github.com/andersju/webbkoll-backend) is "a tiny script that makes use of Puppeteer. It visits a given URL with Chromium and returns JSON with headers, cookies, requests, etc." This gives us the idea to let our previous Green Instances List collide with this Webbkoll backend. The list could display another category, and show how many third-party cookies an instance has installed. Similar to GreenFediverse, such a service that checks Fediverse instances for third-party tracking cookies, could raise awareness of privacy issues and thus add another ethical dimension. From an ecological point of view, this counter-tracking of instances-tracking would mean making the advertising and marketing industry more visible, not only from a privacy point of view, but also because tracking consumes unnecessary energy resources. We have already talked about web hosts that respect privacy, but my question would be rather: what about cases where the owner of a server is not responsible, but the operator of an instance? The example shows: The practice of tracking destroys trust, and we could actively counter that here. Disscussions also on matrix: https://matrix.to/#/#greenfediverse:matrix.org