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Data for “Mortgage Brokers Sent People’s Estimated Credit, Address, and Veteran Status to Facebook”

This contains the data for our story "Mortgage Brokers Sent People’s Estimated Credit, Address, and Veteran Status to Facebook".

Dozens of mortgage-related websites transmitted information on visitors through the Meta Pixel.

Methodology

The Markup tested hundreds of mortgage-related websites from the Nationwide Mortgage Licensing System & Registry. While the national database is not accessible to the public, we used lists of mortgage partners from the Mortgage Research Center and Home Lending Pal. This gave us a list of 857 mortgage companies.

We used automated Google Searches to find the website associated with each mortgage company by taking the first Google search result. We then manually reviewed this list to remove broken websites and websites that were not directly related to the mortgage company we searched for. This resulted in a list of 745 mortgage websites with a uniquely attributable domain.

We then ran an automated Blacklight scan on these websites. You can read more about how Blacklight conducts its scans here. The results showed that of these sites, 253 employed the Meta tracking pixel.

We filtered these websites to those in the top 1 million websites overall by web traffic, using the Tranco top sites list. Of the remaining 85 websites, we manually inspected the network traffic while visiting these sites. We looked for any network calls to Facebook servers for the following events:

  • A page view event when the page initially loaded, sending the name of the page, the URL, and a user ID.
  • A button click event when a user clicked on a button to log in or access an internal link, sending the button text.
  • A scroll event when a user scrolled down the page, sending the percentage of the page scrolled.

When we found evidence of any of these taking place, we documented it with a screenshot showing the network activity in the browser’s Developer Tools’ Network activity panel showing the call, and the information sent. This resulted in the 11 domains we include here, with one folder per domain. We also included a HAR file for the testing session for each site. A HAR file is an archive format supported by most major browsers that contains a recording of all network requests made and received during a browsing session. (Note: Any instance of personal information or a login email or password appearing in plaintext in a HAR file was replaced with the string MARKUP_REDACTED).

Questions? Write to us: [email protected] or [email protected]

Data

  • meta-pixel-mortgage-blacklight.csv 17KB. 254 rows. First row is the header.

  • We created folders for every website we tested. Inside each folder, there are:

    • screenshots of relevant data being sent to Facebook via the Meta tracking pixel
    • HAR files saved during the process of documenting the data collection

Data Dictionary

The data format of meta-pixel-edtech-blacklight.csv is as follows:

Column Description
organization The organization of the websites we tested.
domain The domain of the websites we tested.
bl_domain The domain of the websites we tested, as it appears in Blacklight.
third_party_trackers, cookies The number of ad trackers and third-party cookies found on each website. See the Blacklight repo for more details.
canvas_fingerprints, session_recorders, key_logging, meta_pixel_events Tests for the existence of canvas fingerprinting, session recording, key logging, and Meta pixel events. See the Blacklight repo for more details.
ga Test for the existence of Google Analytics’ “Remarketing Audiences” tool. See the Blacklight methodology for more details.
traffic_rank The Tranco rank of each website.

Licensing

Copyright 2024, The Markup News Inc.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

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