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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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