Web beacon
Method to track the viewing of a webpage / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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A web beacon[note 1] is a technique used on web pages and email to unobtrusively (usually invisibly) allow checking that a user has accessed some content.[1] Web beacons are typically used by third parties to monitor the activity of users at a website for the purpose of web analytics or page tagging.[2] They can also be used for email tracking.[3] When implemented using JavaScript, they may be called JavaScript tags.[4] Web beacons are unseen HTML elements that track a webpage views. Upon the user revisiting the webpage, these beacons are connected to cookies established by the server, facilitating undisclosed user tracking.[5]
This article is missing information about Facebook Pixel (incoming redirect). (November 2022) |
Using such beacons, companies and organizations can track the online behavior of web users. At first, the companies doing such tracking were mainly advertisers or web analytics companies; later social media sites also started to use such tracking techniques, for instance through the use of buttons that act as tracking beacons.
In 2017, W3C published a candidate specification for an interface that web developers can use to create web beacons.[6]