FAQ
Why are so many websites locked?
If a website triggers a Big Tech Detective lock, it may be because one of the tech monopolies owns it. You may know that Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp, but did you know that Google owns YouTube, Microsoft owns LinkedIn, and Amazon owns Twitch? Part of the way these companies consolidate their power is by buying up smaller, potential and nascent competitors.
Another reason a website might be locked is that they are using products or services from one of these companies. Amazon Web Services, for instance, is a cloud computing service that powers many high traffic websites, including Netflix , and is a huge, often unseen part of their business. In the first quarter of 2020, AWS accounted for only 13.5% of Amazon’s total revenue, but was responsible for a staggering 77% of its operating income.
If you use this tool for even a short time, it becomes clear that there’s a whole economy of data online obscured from view — and if you have all four companies locked, it’s virtually impossible to browse the internet as you normally would.
If you want to load a page, simply toggle the lock switch to off, or close the pop up and reload.
Who is behind Big Tech Detective?
Based on the groundbreaking reporting by Kashmir Hill & Dhruv Mehrotra in Gizmodo, this browser extension seeks to replicate the experience of the custom-built VPN that allowed Hill to avoid using each of the tech giants for an entire week at a time. Together with the Anti-Monopoly Fund at the Economic Security Project , Mehrotra has worked with developer Alden Rivendale Jones and designer Emily Lin to bring this extension to the public at large.
Why does Big Tech Detective track domains owned by Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, but not track domains owned by Apple?
The majority of the data this tool analyzes is from advertising and cloud services. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the dominant cloud platform, with the two other most common infrastructure providers Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) growing at rates double that of Amazon. Facebook and Google have long been dominant in digital advertising, but Amazon is also starting to gain a foothold in this market as well.
While Apple exercises monopoly power in other ways, and is the defendant in a civil suit filed by the gaming company Epic for anticompetitive behavior, it doesn’t account for a significant portion of data in a web browsing experience.
Why is this browser extension available on Chrome?
We thought long and hard about building this tool for Chrome, which is itself a Google product. In the end, Google Chrome’s market share in web browsing was itself the most convincing argument: as of August 2020 , Chrome is the leading U.S. desktop browser with 58.6% of the market, followed by Safari at 15.8%, with Edge, Firefox, and Internet Explorer picking up the rest. (In search, Google is even more dominant , with 81% of all general search queries in the US on desktop and a whopping 94% on mobile.) While these stats illustrate the consolidated landscape and market dominance these companies enjoy, we ultimately decided that reaching as many people as possible with this tool was paramount.
What data does the tool collect?
Big Tech Detective does not store or retain any information about your browsing history on our servers. The only data sent to our servers are the IP addresses of the requested webpage and the content it loads — for example, Facebook pixels and Google Analytics scripts, fonts, and images. We use these IP addresses to determine the companies behind the content you are seeing. Before we send any data to our server, we first try to figure out ownership locally using a list of common IP addresses and domains. In the event that we cannot identify a particular IP address, we take precautions to only send minimal amounts of data to our server. The IP addresses are encrypted with HTTPS and sent to a Cloud Application Platform called Digital Ocean.
The information we analyze cannot be used to identify you. We do not use tracking cookies or advertising and analytics technology.
Big Tech Detective also stores some information on your computer that is not shared with anyone else. This information consists of the visited website and the requested asset URLs. You can delete this information by using the “Clear History” button on the Big Tech Detective extension.
If you are concerned about accessing particularly sensitive websites, please turn off or disable Big Tech Detective or use another browser.
How does the tool work?
When you install the Big Tech Detective and navigate to a webpage, the Chrome extension will inspect the IP addresses of where the page retrieves data from and where it sends data to. This is achieved using Google Chrome’s built in webRequest API .
Big Tech Detective then determines if the requested IP address belongs to Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or Amazon by querying a remote database containing many millions of addresses owned by the tech giants. If the requested IP address is in the database, we flag it and surface a message to the user about its ownership. Our lookup database was compiled by leveraging the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) whois server. Specifically, we query the WHOIS database by querying AS numbers of the tech giants to compile a list of their IP space.
We send only the requested IP address to our API to handle the querying of the Big Tech Detective database. We use an external server to host the database of IP addresses covered for two reasons. The first is that the data would slow down the browsing experience if packaged with the extension. There are about 52,000 Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) blocks of addresses in the database, and storing them in a way that is accessible to frequent queries would use a considerable amount of memory that slows down overally browsing considerably (~1GB). The second reason is that, as we are currently distributing the extension to be side-loaded, if we packaged the IP data with the extension, any updates to the data would need to be re-installed.
What can I do to stop these companies from tracking my online activity?
In the absence of strong federal privacy laws, there’s only so much you can do to try to stop these companies from collecting and using your data. However, you can use more privacy-protective browsers like Mozilla Firefox or Brave, update your privacy settings on your apps, or delete your data from their companies. For instance, you can choose how long Google can retain your search and location data .
For more large-scale change, we’ll need to ask our federal regulators and Congress to step up and rein in the power of these monopolistic companies. Among the many strong recommendations laid out by the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee’s October report, structural separation to eliminate the conflicts of interest that these companies own will be an important solution.
Structural solutions of this nature will require enforcement actions from the Federal Trade Commission or Department of Justice and/or new legislation passed by Congress, both of which are advocated by many policy experts and activists. Even Tim Bray, former AWS engineer and Vice President, has called for AWS to spin off from Amazon to circumvent concerns from customers about Amazon’s insight into usage metrics.
To find out how you can support these calls or sign a petition, keep scrolling for our Call to Action.