The Third Party

Nothing on this page asked your permission, because there was nothing to ask for. This site sets no cookies and loads no file from any domain but its own, so it has no consent banner to show you. The banner you meet everywhere else is a receipt for something you did not agree to.

That is the argument in one line, and the rest of the site is the evidence for it. Every page runs the same four steps: what actually happens, who profits from it, what a less extractive version would look like, and where the claim came from. Each page ends with something you could do about it, and most of those things take minutes rather than afternoons.

Where a number could not be verified, the page says so instead of guessing. If you want current figures for how much of a typical page is served by other companies, the Web Almanac measures it every year, and you are better off reading it there than trusting a figure quoted here. ¹

Three ways in

I just use the web. Start Here holds two ladders of concrete actions, every rung priced in minutes, with permission to stop at any of them. If you have ten minutes rather than an afternoon, read Seven Things That Aren't True, where each item ends with something you can check in a browser rather than something you have to believe.

I run a website. You Don't Need Google Analytics is the most immediately useful page here for anyone who publishes, and it argues for the dullest possible replacement. The Swap Shop covers what to replace and what each swap costs you, in money and in effort.

I'm here for the research. Sources is the whole bibliography: every entry says what the source is bad at, and the ones nobody has managed to verify yet are marked as unverified rather than quietly dropped. What Leaves Your Browser is the taxonomy underneath the argument.

Follow one page load

One Page Load is the reason this site exists. It takes a single view of an ordinary local news page and walks it forward one request at a time: fourteen events between your keystroke and the auction where you are sold. Nothing in it is unusual, which is the point.

Two shorter walkthroughs do the same work by hand. Consent Theatre is eight clicks through a single cookie banner, where every step is a defect that European regulators have already recorded in writing, and the page says plainly that the banner is a composite rather than a survey of real sites. Nine Things People Say answers the standard objections one at a time and concedes the ground that deserves conceding, and it is honest about the two of its seven harms that it has not finished arguing.

What to do about it

Every page here ends with an action, and the smallest one takes two minutes. Start Here has the full ladder, ordered by effort.

Nothing on this site requires you to delete an account, pass a purity test, or feel bad about any of it. Guilt is the least useful thing this subject produces and the most common, and it is not what this is for. The honest answer to "should I care about all of this?" is no, not all of it. Pick one thing, do that one, and read the rest purely for interest if you feel like it.

The receipts

Everything above describes how this site is built rather than quoting figures about it. Receipts is where the figures are: what a page load costs, what it weighs, what it emits, and the defects that have not been fixed. It is the kind of page most sites could publish and almost none do.

What this site is not

Not a directory of tools, and not a list of products to switch to. Not legal advice. Not comprehensive: it is an argument, illustrated, and it stops where the evidence stops.