Disconnect - Tracking Leads to Hacking

Every site is listening.<br>Hear what tracking sounds like.

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Hidden tracking is the new hacking.<br>We expose and block it at the source.<br>Your personal data is secretly collected across the internet at massive scale. AI weaponizes it like never before. Passive collection becomes precision attacks on you, your employees, and your customers. Disconnect cuts off the data supply.<br>Get Started For Business<br>Enterprise tracker protection

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Lightbox API<br>Privacy intelligence data

"Nation-state actors and cybercriminals shift from 'breaking in' to 'logging in.'"<br>— Cloudflare 2026 Threat Intelligence Report (March 2026)

Industry Standard Tracker Intelligence

350M+<br>People Protected<br>Integrated by default into major browsers worldwide

+50T<br>Trackers Visualized<br>Mapping the hidden internet at scale

6T+<br>Trackers Blocked Yearly<br>Protecting 350M+ users from ~50 trackers per day

15<br>Years of Tracker Intelligence<br>Industry standard since 2011<br>Learn how

4 of the top 5 browsers<br>Disconnect's tracker intelligence has been leveraged by browsers that ship to billions of users worldwide.

Mozilla Firefox

Microsoft Edge

Google Chrome

Samsung Internet

The Problem<br>Trackers are embedded everywhere.<br>They silently build the data profiles attackers weaponize against you.

75%<br>of websites have hidden trackers<br>HTTP Archive Web Almanac

70%<br>of mobile apps send data to trackers before any consent dialog<br>Kollnig et al., Oxford

~50%<br>of inbox emails contain tracking pixels<br>Proton Mail

42%of all web requests on U.S. Army networks were to tracker domains.<br>Trackers from banned apps including TikTok were still present in web traffic.<br>U.S. Army Cyber Institute, West Point (February 2026)

Your Data Has a Price<br>How attackers access and weaponize your data.<br>Hint: attackers use AI too.<br>Hackers don't have to hack anymore — your personal data is for sale directly through data brokers and indirectly through sophisticated ad tech.

Step One<br>Buy data direct or targeted ads<br>Data brokers aggregate data about you from different tracking sources, including your IP, location, real name, email, phone, and much more. Attackers buy this data directly, and also leverage sophisticated advertising platforms. Ad campaigns allow attackers to hyper-target advertisements based on thousands of audience segments.

Step Two<br>How ads reveal your data<br>When you click or even see an ad, the advertiser receives your unique device identifiers, location, behavioral profile, and the audience segments used to target you. Anything you submit on their site or app — email, name, form data — or that they can track also gets tied directly to your profile.

Step Three<br>Precision AI-powered attacks<br>Your personal data becomes AI fuel for surveillance, stalking, blackmail, social engineering, and precision phishing — all aimed at the real you. These attacks evolve as AI tooling matures. Documented cases include high-level government tracking and harassment of individuals at places of worship, healthcare clinics, and immigration offices. No hacking required.

Real-time bidding is "the biggest data breach ever recorded." It broadcasts personal data 178 trillion times per year across the U.S. and Europe.<br>— Irish Council for Civil Liberties (2022)

Leading Research and Technology<br>Our data drives headlines.<br>Leading journalists trust Disconnect to expose what others can't find.

February 2026 Featured<br>TikTok's pixel secretly collects health data from crisis and cancer support sites.<br>Disconnect provided the technical analysis for BBC Future's investigation into TikTok's expanded web tracking pixel. Our team found that the updated pixel collects information in unusual ways compared to its competitors, intercepting data from Google Tag Manager and transmitting health information without site owners' knowledge. "They're silently capturing that data without the site owner explicitly sharing that information with TikTok," said Patrick Jackson, Disconnect's CTO.

Read the BBC investigation Read our full technical research

May 2026 Latest<br>"A native TV app is a data firehose."<br>Casey Oppenheim, Disconnect's CEO, told Slate that smart TV apps capture rich behavioral data like device type, session length, household fingerprint, IP address, ad exposure, and the context of what was watched before and after. AI-enhanced tracking can now identify who in the household is watching, infer interests and political leanings, and shift ad targeting from the household down to the individual. Cross-device identifier matching makes the Smart TV app the new "holy grail" of ad targeting, and most TV platforms have weaker, buried privacy controls compared to web and mobile.

Read the Slate article

Video Disconnect research on AI data threats featured on Today Show.<br>2025

Data-based research on fingerprinting prevalence on the web.<br>2019

NY Times used Disconnect tech to test 250 iOS apps and record how they're tracking.<br>2021

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