Identifying Third-Party Scripts

Now that I’d spent time itemizing third-party scripts and finding the most prevalent ones, I wanted to identify what these scripts/services do, who owns them, etc.

I’d already found myself wondering, “what is the Rubicon Project?” or “why is 2mdn.net everywhere?” while digging into client sites. Initially unable to find a third-party index to answer these questions, I set out to create one of my own:

rough third-party services indexing site
Rough/WIP third-party index site

As excited as I was to have a quick Jekyll site with live search stubbed out, I quickly realized that properly researching & indexing all these would be no small feat. Early in my process, I luckily stumbled across Ind.ie’s Better privacy tool site’s tracker index:

better.fyi tracker index
better.fyi/trackers

Bookmarked! Problem solved! I should have known that Aral, Laura, and the Ind.ie team might have something like this. It’s a great resource, and likely the result of some really hard work. Thanks to them for making it available!