Companies
No one actually knows how many companies are out there tracking internet users. There are thousands we know about. Some abide by the law and some don't. Some allow you to opt-out of being tracked, while many do not.
In this section, we wanted to give you some power to track the trackers. We've highlighted some of the biggest and fastest growing tracking companies on the internet today. Here's what we are providing:
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A brief company bio
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Google street view of where they work (feel free to snoop around as much as you want)
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The number of employees they have (each person is a potential data breach or abuser of data)
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The major clients they work with (How is all this data put to to work? Who are they collecting data for?)
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Legal trouble they've had (There's not much on the books for internet privacy law, but when legal trouble happens, it usually clashes directly with the Bill of Rights here in the U.S.)
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Any additional information we may have found
Let's Track 'em Down
Doubleclick
This company is Google's third-party tracker and ad server, and is by far the most widely used on the internet. Google generates 96 percent of its revenue through advertising services - so Doubleclick is the biggest in the business.
Where They Work: This is one of the largest technology-owned buildings in the world, and is New York City's third-largest building in terms of square footage at 2,900,000 square feet. Google owns all of it.
How Many Work There: 1,541 Major
Who They Work For: Publishers for Microsoft, General Motors, Coca-Cola, Motorola, L'Oreal, Apple, Visa, Nike and many more.
Trouble With the Law: A federal class action suit was brought against DoubleClick in 2000. The suit claimed DoubleClick was violating wiretapping and surveillance laws by placing cookies on user's computers. One year later the ruling was overturned because the original website authorized Doubleclick to install the cookies. This set the stage for third-party tracking to progress to what we see today.
Facebook Connect
The other behemoth on the third-party tracking block. Facebook is the second largest tracker to Doubleclick. They track you on every site with a Facebook "Like" or "Share" button, and collect information about where you are on the internet even if you are logged out of Facebook.
How Many Work There (entirety of Facebook): 6,337
Who They Work For: Facebook, Advertisers on Facebook
Legal Trouble: In 2007, Facebook settled a class action lawsuit for $9.5 million after launching a service called "Beacon" that allowed users to share their online shopping activity. Facebook brought back Beacon in 2011 renamed "Sponsored Stories" that let advertisers buy permission to re-publish your posts and likes to your friends. The class action lawsuit that followed was settled for $20 million.
AddThis
This company offers a service that works in a similar way to social media share buttons. However, AddThis's share buttons, ranging from Facebook to Reddit (25 available in all), have a cleaner look than other social media buttons. They work like an advertisement when it comes to tracking. AddThis tracks you with a cookie everywhere their buttons are: more than 14 million websites. Because AddThis is tied to social media, they may also collect personal information about you, which they then resell at their discretion.
Where They Work: Unfortunately, there is no street view available. Here is the satellite image and here is the website for the building.
How Many Work There: 120
Who They Work For: Adobe, BlueKai, ABC News, DailyMotion, Starbucks, Today and more.
Trouble With the Law: While AddThis has not directly broken the law, lawsuits have been filed against companies using AddThis to track their users, which included children in one case.
BlueKai
This company functions as an advertising marketplace. They track you on sites they are associated with, but do not offer targeted ads themselves. Instead, they buy ad space and build a profile on you, placing you into relevant categories. When you load a page with their ad space, they share your categories with advertisers and hold a virtual auction to determine which ad you see.
For example: Let's say BlueKai tracks you shopping for a new bicycle. They build your profile and drop you in the category for those showing interests in bicycles. The next time you visit a site where BlueKai has ad space, before the page even loads, BlueKai will have notified all the ad companies working with them you are looking for bicycles, and those companies will all engage in a virtual auction to place their bicycle ad on the webpage. Highest bidder wins, of course.
How Many Work There: 142
Who They Work For: Twitter, Doubleclick, Acxiom, Addthis, Forbes
Trouble With the Law: none just yet
Next: Catch Them Watching You
Rapleaf
This company collects information about you for an interesting and scary purpose - to verify you are an actual person. They tie your tracking data to your email, Facebook, LinkedIn and other sources. Their goal, they claim, is to protect marketers from scammers and fake emails by verifying the identity of users that interact with the marketers.
Here's how this works: A marketer is offering an online coupon for free ice cream, but you have to put in an email address. The marketer is ultimately trying to build a mailing list. After the coupon is downloaded 10,000 times, the marketer sends the data on all 10,000 users to Rapleaf for verification. Rapleaf weeds out the fake emails used to download the coupon by linking the data to often-used emails and social media accounts. Doing this saves the marketer money because they won't waste resources trying to market to users that are never going to respond.
This makes Rapleaf one of the few trackers ultimately tying your activity directly to your name. They claim to be able to collect data on 80 percent of all U.S. emails. Rapleaf is commonly used by politicians when campaigning, since they can tie names to voting records.
Where They Work: (12th floor)
How Many Work There: 44
Who They Work For: Ebay, Hallmark, Microsoft, Chilis more at the bottom of their page.
Trouble With The Law: Although Rapleaf claims to never release people's names in the data it sells, the Wall Street Journal caught them doing it by "accidentally" including social media ID numbers. Rapleaf has also placed people's data into categories capable of identifying individuals (such as religious affiliation) contradicting their own privacy policy.
What's Your Rapleaf data worth: Items like your age, gender and location are free, while your specific interests, such as what you shop for, are worth about 3 cents per category. Pennies make dollars.