With all the hoo-ha about Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and now, ‘shadow profiles’ that track non-Facebook users via an invisible pixel in a web page, we thought that we would check some majors to see what sneaky tracking they were up to. Oil IT Journal has previous form in checking Oils’ websites for compliance with web standards as we reported back in 2002, when we found that, according to the W3C’s validator, all oil companies’ and standards bodies’ websites throw up multiple errors. They still do by the way.
Regarding tracking, most all sites embed tracking cookies from Google, notably the Google Tag Manager, which, so far at least, has not been associated with particularly nefarious behavior*. But what we were looking for was use of the sneaky Facebook tracking pixel that shares your behavior with Facebook without your knowledge, even when you are not on Facebook. All the oil and gas majors we checked were Facebook pixel free. Except for one, Statoil!
You can check a webpage for the pixel with CTRL+U which displays the page source. Look for something like
<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com...
which indicates a hidden tracker. And OilIT.com you ask? We don’t even use cookies. So no third party tracking chez nous, neither by Google nor Facebook!
* Although Facebook did call-out Google and Twitter for similarly intrusive user tracking.