Outhouse › Surveillance › In-house intelligence

Homegrown tracking

Data the site sends about the visitor to its own servers.

Why it matters

Third-party trackers have one weakness: they are third parties. They appear in browser extensions, privacy reports and regulators' slide decks. Homegrown tracking appears in none of these. It runs on the site's own domain, under a subdomain nobody would think to block, and reports back several times a second.

The largest platforms have found that once tracking is built in-house, it stops being tracking and becomes the product.

How Outhouse measures it

Outhouse counts calls the page makes with navigator.sendBeacon, and calls to telemetry endpoints (metrics, collect, events, rum, pixel and similar), that go to the same company as the page. Ten or more scores in full.

This audit counts towards Surveillance, with a weight of 3. A category is 75% its two highest-scoring audits and 25% all of its audits, weighted, so a site is judged mostly on what it does most and partly on how many things it does.

How to improve your score

Install Shitely Profile. It is included on every plan. See all products.

Related audits

• Session recording and heatmaps: Services that record every mouse movement, scroll and click for replay later.