Best Practices for helping dealers avoid pixel-data-miners?

[George Nenni]

And I use the term pixel loosely. A very enlightened Refresher turned me on to the Ghostery Chrome app, I've got that stacked along with the Facebook Pixel Helper app, my goal is to help dealers get clarity on who may be harvesting website visitors for competitive-conquesting purposes. Any experience auditing the Ghostery results, FB pixels, to remove/wound old trackers, while only keeping current vendor/OEM tracking?

 

[craigh]

Good luck
The biggest vendors are amassing this data from everywhere.
100,000 phone apps are tracking all sorts of data and reporting back to the man.
You can see the client side tracking, but there's plenty of server side tracking as well.
Once they have your IP address they can start to connect the dots and build a consumer profile that attempts to represent 1 person.
When I spoke to DealerX a few years ago they said American Express was one of their biggest data providers. It's not all obvious unfortunately.

It's brilliant stuff.

 

[Greg Schafer]

Speaking of data, do any dealers out there have a privacy agreement that they send to 3rd party vendors so they don't use the dealerships data?

 

[mikesayre]

Good luck
The biggest vendors are amassing this data from everywhere.
100,000 phone apps are tracking all sorts of data and reporting back to the man.

Agree it's rampant, has been since mobile platforms took over. Any free mobile apps are definitely using your data, also free credit reports are the holy grail of building quality consumer profiles for advertising, mainly because of the cross device usage for families. I check it at work PC, home PC, my mobile, my wife's mobile, wife's work PC, etc. And any app which accomplishes uncovering multi-device usage for that matter, facebook, twitter, etc.

Dealer's should audit which tracking codes are leftover from previous vendors and remove those on their websites, or ask your vendor to do it. Now with the OEM's and their partners with their tracking codes on our sites.. who really get's this data? Not sure, but I'm not confident a dealer can completely avoid it or if it matters at this point. I know some OEM's utilize the dealer website codes for tier 2 remarketing ads for a metro area, but are upfront about it. There's a bunch of ad overlap out there for sure with every brand and it's dealer network.

 

[Tyler Makin]

You can see every service that is tracking your website visitors using the tools built in to Google Chrome.

Just click Control+Shift+I (or Command+Option+I on a Mac) to open the hidden tools, then click the Network tab near the top. Refresh your page and you will see all the "requests" your website makes, including those from unwanted tracking vendors.

 

[craigh]

You can see every service that is tracking your website visitors using the tools built in to Google Chrome.

Just click Control+Shift+I (or Command+Option+I on a Mac) to open the hidden tools, then click the Network tab near the top. Refresh your page and you will see all the "requests" your website makes, including those from unwanted tracking vendors.

Although useful for front-end scripts, this doesn't show server side tracking or a number of canvas options used for fingerprinting, etc.
It's great for finding the generic trackers installed on your site though, as well as countless other things about your site's performance and configuration.

 

[Alexander Lau]

Ghostery looks awesome. It's none of the data harvesters' business.