Conservative News Sites Track You Lots More Than Left-Leaning Ones

According to a new study, the right end of the fractured online news industry also tracks its audience far more aggressively than the left does.In a study published last week, researchers from King's College London, the privacy-focused browser firm Brave, and the research arm of Spanish telecom firm Telefonica compared the surveillance practices of left- and right-leaning news sites across the web. When the researchers ordered popular sites by how many cookies they placed, the contrast at the top end of surveillance-happy sites was even more pronounced: The top 25 percent of conservative sites in terms of tracking planted well over 300 cookies in browsers, versus less than half that number for that same top 25 percent slice of liberal sites."Basically, ad tech is more evolved in right-leaning websites than in left-leaning websites," says Nishanth Sastry, a senior lecturer in computer science at King's College London, who along with the other researchers will present the study at the Web Conference in Taiwan in April.To carry out their study, the researchers started with a list of "partisan" news sites they took from an earlier analysis of the political news spectrum by BuzzFeed News. Right-leaning sites ranged from Dailycaller.com to Realclearpolitics.com to TheGatewayPundit.com, while left-leaning ones ranged from Salon.com to Rawstory.com to Alternet.com.The researchers then crawled both the right- and left-leaning lists of political websites that BuzzFeed had defined with a set of web-browsing "personas," essentially bots designed to impersonate real users whose browsers had previously visited sites that marked them as belonging to certain demographics. Since those prices are generally set by an ad exchange auction, they suggest that more advertisers are bidding to show ads on right-leaning sites than on left-leaning ones.The relatively high price of ads on conservative sites, the researchers argue, creates a kind of chicken-and-egg situation.