Top Data Recipients

When a website is loaded, a user’s IP address is often sent to a number of companies and services. IP addresses are one of the most-overlooked, yet important, pieces of personally identifying information that allows users' web browsing history to be monitored.

Determining exactly what companies and services get user IP address information is a difficult task. Many companies take steps to hide the network addresses they use to harvest IP addresses. Other times, it may not be immediately clear if a small company is a subsidiary of a much larger, more powerful company. Furthermore, in a connected world, companies may track users anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world.

We have spent over a decade unravelling the hidden ways user IP addresses are harvested and transmitted across the web. We have spent countless hours tracking down these companies, finding their privacy policies, what countries they are based in, and their corporate structures. We link all this data to each and every data transmission across millions of pages.