The Firefox plugin Ghostery was developed to help people searching online understand what websites track about them and put them in control of their privacy. Ironically, the Ghostery plugin is also a goldmine when it comes to finding starting points for possible connections between websites.
From the Ghostery website:
“Ghostery tracks the trackers and gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity.”
You can see a screenshot of the popular website ReadWriteWeb that shows how Ghostery displays that information below:
Ghostery ReadWriteWeb
Of course one you’ve determined the analytics and advertising platforms that a site is using, you can use tools like the ones discussed in this post about connecting potential website ownership through analytics and advertising code.
ReadWriteWeb.com actually isn’t the best type of site to to try to connect to other sites (larger sites often have exclusively used analytics IDs and advertising codes)…so, I took a look at the popular free online flash gaming site freeonlinegames.com:
Ghostery FreeOnlineGames.com
For reverse-engineering purposes the point of using Ghostery this way is 2-fold:
- You see the what tracking a site is using as you browse alerting you to possible means of making connections between websites
- Based on the tracking codes the site is using you can determine what existing services you might be able to use to tie the sites together
The obvious tools to use in this case are any of the tools that track shared adsense and analytics code. In this case I used SpyOnWeb.com:
SpyOnWeb - FreeOnlineGames.com
Obviously that’s just a partial screenshot of all the data that SpyOnWeb shows for FreeOnlineGames.com.
The other thing to keep in mind is that shared analytics ids do not prove that the sites are registered, controlled, or owned by the same person or company. The reason why is because some sites share advertising revenue so multiple adsense IDs controlled by various people will show up under the same site.
A couple of things you can do to ascertain whether it’s like the sites sharing adsense revenue are controlled by the same person or company are to:
- View the source code to see if the site is using multiple adsense codes
- Check whois for additional clues about the registrant (always keep in mind that whois information isn’t always accurate)
