The Third Party Diary: Tracking the trackers on Dutch governmental websites

Abstract

This article discusses how the browser plugin Ghostery contributes to a particular understanding of contemporary consumer surveillance by making Web tracking transparent. The Tracker Tracker is a digital methods tool that, by following Ghostery, detects trackers on specific sets of URLs. It was used to examine all the websites of the Government of the Netherlands on a regular basis. Ghostery also invokes a particular informational genre which has an effect on how we understand the issue of Web tracking. The use of such a tool therefore raises a question: what happens when we repurpose an ‘issue device’ as ‘research device’?