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Welcome! I am Ramsey Isler, and I am the product manager here at The Markup. I run the product and technology team, which maintains our website and helps to develop many great tools that are famous for signs. We complete all of this without tracking one on the site, and this is not easy!
We live in a world full of our digital products with algorithms that try to get rid of our needs and desires by looking at every action we take. We do not do it in coding. We try to collect as much data as possible from our visitors because we respect their privacy.
However, as a company operating primarily on the web, we need to know how good the service of our audiences and how we can do what is better. We believe that one of the best ways to get to know old and simple users: just talk to them.
Therefore, this summer we conducted an interview with some researchers who used one of our first tools, Blacklight Privacy. BlackLight wipes web sites to detect the specific user tracking techniques you use and those who share your data. We launched Blacklight in the fall of 2020, and since then, many journalists, academics and researchers have used it to perform more than 10 million surveying operations. The tool was an important resource for dozens of research projects as well. We have contacted people behind these projects (and some of them communicate to us!) To open a dialogue about how Blacklight can serve the best in the future.
This is what we learned.
Blacklight users do not care about scanning specific pages as we thought they would be
When the user requests a Blacklight website for a web site, the current version of the code (as of publishing) wipes the home page and one random page you can find inside the site structure. Internally, one of the largest elements in our Blacklight’s feature list was the ability to scan specific pages within the field. We thought this would be the very impressive and required capacity.
Surprisingly, most of the users I spoke with did not see this as a top priority. Some of them were definitely interested, but this interest did not provoke the level of excitement that we expect, and some users categorically said that the feature would not make a difference in their work. We will still build this feature, but this insight changed the process of setting priorities.
The lesson learned: Users do not always see the world the way you do. They often have very specific functions, and they may not care much about things that you think are useful.
People are really interested in tracking Tiktok
The repeated topic in the interviews was how Tiktok began to become a better area of attention for researchers trying to understand the state of tracking on the Internet. Some researchers who use Blacklight to work with federal or government government officials, and the political issue of banning Tiktok in the United States leads to a somewhat increased interest here. But it is also the popularity of the rapid expansion of Tiktok platform, especially with young people who may be particularly vulnerable to harmful data exchange practices.
The lesson learned: The Internet does not work in a vacuum, and the people who are looking for it do not. Hot topics change the conversation and affect research projects that are receiving and funding. The more our tools for covering the emerging trends, the better we can serve our fans.
The researchers want to see what is going on with the followers in Europe
We are an American company, and many researchers who use Blacklight are located in the United States and conducting research on sites run by American organizations. For years, BlackLight has performed behind the scenes by the American IP surnames by default. We haven’t seen many requests to change this, so it doesn’t seem likely to have a large demand for information about the tracking status of the European web visitor perspective.
It turned out that we reduced the level of attention here. Although these researchers are mostly in the United States, they are very interested in how Europe’s general regulations affect data protection (GDPR) and other European Union regulations on the state of internet tracking in other countries – and whether companies are really following all rules.
Whenever you raise the ability to add the black light feature to allow users to “simulate a satirical simulation” from the European Union, the faces of the people were lit up. The overwhelming response was, “Yes, please!”
We are now working on this feature 🙂
The lesson learned: In coding, we would like to dig deep and expose what is hidden, but we often do not venture outside our national borders when we do so. But the web is international, and our tools are at its best when they can highlight dark places near and far.
There is a great interest in monitoring followers over time
Researchers who use Blacklight are looking into many different spaces on the Internet. Some are looking at how to leak a very sensitive personal data through web sites for opium clinics, some of which are looking at government websites, some monitor the tracking of the extremist group sites and the hate group. But a unified topic of interviews is that researchers wanted a more quantitative vision on how to change the positioning position in the sites over time.
As one of the researchers said, “The sites are improving, but it was bad in the past.” People who are invested in creating and enforcing policies and laws that protect user data want an objective and measurable idea on how to improve things (or worse). Blacklight provides a web snapshot of only one point; It does not give you a feeling of how to develop the followers of this site. This seems to be a need for our users to collect their own solutions with varying degrees of success.
The lesson learned: Researchers who use Blacklight Care deeply to protect user data, and they are in it for a long time. The tools that can give them a historical perspective allow them to discover new methods of research and determine whether the regulations and pressure campaigns are operating. We do not have a strong way to address this with Blacklight features yet, but we are working on them.
Our ready -made meals: Blacklight is useful, and our users want to see the next
Both researchers who were interviewed with abundant praise began on Blacklight. Ease of use and the collection of features made something they use a lot and recommend others. Some people even use it as an educational tool.
But with this praise, many expectations came to continue to build a Blacklight to process new tracking techniques and enable research on a larger scale. This is a hard challenge for a small team like our team, but we definitely encourage us to influence that we have spoken so far.
If you have used Blacklight on a project or have other comments for our team, we will like to hear about it! Please contact with [email protected].
Thanks for reading.
Ramsey Esler
Product manager
Coding
Credits
As published here
Photo by Pietro Jeng on Unsplash
