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A question mainly for coders/website designers etc:
What might be the reasons why a platform used for graphing and screening the stock market in a browser has got (according to ublock origin) 230 trackers/third party connections running? A very similar competing site has got 3 trackers on their site according to the same Firefox addon.
The main question is: did you pay for accessing that platform?
The main two reasons why trackers are used are actually same reason, but in two instances. It's behavioral tracking. Internally, it is used to see how the site performs, which functions are used and which are not, what links are clicked, which options are selected, etc. etc. This happens in every single project I've ever seen, and it can be (actually, will be) both client-side and server-side. The former is visible to you, the latter is usually not, but it's always there. If it's a paid product, it will be used to make more people pay more money for the product - and for the provider to spend less money on providing it (e.g. by optimizing it or shutting down options that aren't used). Some of it can also be outsourced, because not everybody is an expert in properly doing that, and there are shrink-wrap solutions that can do a lot of it for you.
If you didn't pay for it, then somebody else did. Usually via ads, which serve two functions - one obvious, exposing you to the information the advertiser wants you to see, another unobvious, collecting the same behavioral information, for the same purposes, but for third-party advertisers or marketers. This also has a lot of specialization, so ad platform may have its own tracker and also use a third-party tracking solution to track some aspect that their own tracking doesn't provide. Finding high level of third-party tracking on a private paid platform is usually a case for a beef with the provider - though some providers are big enough to pull it off (like ads on Netflix - what you gonna do, stop streaming?) I.e. if you have no alternative, then why not make a quick buck on the side?
That said, 230 sounds like a very high number - even with what I said, that many separate tracking items look excessive. Though if it counts tracking events then it's plausible - depending on how much things are being tracked and how diligent are the tracker developers on optimizing the performance (not always their best suit since their competitive advantage lies elsewhere) it certainly can get that far.
Yes, I have paid for accessing it. There's no sort of free access or tiered access. There are no visible ads for anything. The price they charge is higher than what the main competitor charges, but they do provide some data that is usually only included in a 3x more expensive product from a different competitor.
During a live youtube stream where the site in question was demonstrated, I thought I detected some shills in the chat, and feedback where a user claimed that the site is very buggy, was promptly deleted.
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First, it's not clear what the ublock numbers are actually measuring. It could include things like ad-like elements removed from the page, or requests blocked that get automatically re-attempted. Maybe on one, it manages to block a whole script that would have done a bunch of stuff, earning a block count of 1, while on the other, the script runs but gets all of the things it tries to do blocked, leading to hundreds of block count entries.
I don't think anyone deliberately adds hundreds of trackers directly to a page. But it's plausible they have a single-digit number of moderately sketchy advertising and analytics services directly added which provide various overlapping services, each of which themselves pulls in several other tracking and analytics gadgets.
They might also have no skill or budget for proper website building tools, so they use sketchy no-code services for basic stuff like account management, accessibility, social media sharing, etc, which all insert their own tracking and analytics scripts using yet more third-party services. There's a whole ecosystem for this sort of thing that most people who would consider themselves coders never touch.
For a stock trading site specifically, they may not bother with visible ads. It's likely they have a lot of analytics for stuff like, which prompts and arrangement of controls etc makes it more likely users will actually create an account and execute a trade, what prompts for higher tiers make it more likely you'll actually upgrade, which of their own ads leads to users coming to the site, creating an account, and using it, where their users are and when they're active, that sort of thing. It's quite possible they also make extra from ad network tracking scripts, connecting your use of a stock trading site at all plus your activities there to your advertising identity for more valuable and better targeted ads elsewhere.
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First explanation greed or something even shadier. Second - just pulling crap dependencies without thinking (hello wordpress)
I figure they're double dipping on monetizing the user. Both with a pretty steep subscription cost (they have no free tier or anything) and also with intense data collection on user behavior, sold on to third parties. Stock traders must be a pretty juicy demographic to get detailed data from.
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Money
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