Web x ray
Gain deep insights into any website, or web asset, including real-time visibility into where a particular web asset appears across websites and apps.
Digital publisher deploys intelligence platform to ensure third-party tracking compliance and mitigate regulatory risk.
Customer
A digital publishing organization with significant web traffic sought to maintain comprehensive visibility and control over third-party tracking technologies deployed across their digital properties to ensure regulatory compliance, protect user privacy, and mitigate legal and reputational risk from unauthorized or non-compliant tracking scripts.
Challenge
Digital publishers face mounting regulatory pressure from GDPR, CCPA, and evolving privacy legislation while managing complex ecosystems of advertising partners, analytics providers, and third-party vendors. Traditional monitoring approaches lack the depth and real-time capabilities necessary to detect unauthorized trackers, identify non-compliant data flows, or understand the complete network of third-party connections operating across their domains. Manual audits are resource-intensive, quickly become outdated, and fail to capture the dynamic nature of modern web tracking technologies.
Solution
Our Web X-Ray platform provides comprehensive, real-time monitoring of all data flows and third-party connections across digital properties. Built on a large-scale custom crawl network that has analyzed hundreds of millions of HTTP requests and JavaScript API calls, and tens of millions of categorized websites, the platform processes data through a proprietary signal intelligence database utilizing advanced heuristics, tracker mapping, script detection, and correlation rules. This infrastructure delivers instant visibility into cookies, JavaScript files, ad tech requests, RTB endpoints, fingerprinting scripts, images, and all web assets operating across publisher domains, enabling continuous compliance monitoring and risk detection.
Result
By implementing Disconnect's intelligence platform, the publisher established continuous, automated monitoring of all third-party tracking technologies across their digital properties. The system identified several previously unknown tracking connections, enabling immediate remediation before regulatory exposure occurred. The platform's real-time alerting capabilities now provide the compliance team with immediate notification of any unauthorized or non-compliant tracking activity, significantly reducing regulatory risk while maintaining operational efficiency in their advertising and analytics infrastructure.
Impact
The precision and comprehensive coverage of Disconnect's tracking intelligence has become essential to the publisher's compliance infrastructure. The organization now maintains continuous monitoring across all digital properties, enabling proactive risk management and providing executive leadership with verifiable documentation of compliance efforts for regulatory inquiries and audits.
The Washington Post leveraged web x-ray technology to expose widespread deployment of browser fingerprinting scripts
Customer
A senior technology columnist at The Washington Post utilized Disconnect's privacy intelligence platform into their investigative journalism framework to conduct in-depth analysis of third-party tracking technologies for multiple nationally-published investigations.
Challenge
Identifying and mapping the deployment patterns of sophisticated browser fingerprinting scripts across the web requires specialized forensic capabilities and proprietary technical infrastructure that exceed the resources available to traditional newsrooms and research teams. Building these capabilities through internal development or external consulting engagements would require substantial time and financial investment while delivering incomplete or inconsistent results.
Solution
Our proprietary automated analysis pipeline delivers comprehensive, forensically-sound intelligence on web asset deployment patterns across the digital ecosystem. The platform provides research teams with institutional-grade data and real-time monitoring capabilities for fingerprinting scripts and other tracking technologies deployed across websites, mobile applications, and digital communication channels.
Result
Our analysis provided the evidentiary foundation for an investigative report published nationally in The Washington Post, demonstrating the platform's capacity to deliver publication-quality intelligence and breakthrough insights into the prevalence and sophistication of browser fingerprinting technologies.
Impact
The precision and forensic integrity of Disconnect's data analysis established a trusted partnership with The Washington Post. The publication has commissioned Disconnect for multiple subsequent investigative reports on privacy and tracking technologies, each resulting in national coverage and advancing public understanding of digital privacy practices.