Glossary
What the words mean
- Every term Snitch uses in a report, in plain English, with no assumed knowledge.
- Tracker
- A piece of code from a different company that your page loads. The moment it runs, it tells that company someone is on your site, and usually enough to recognize who.
- Cookie
- A small note saved inside the visitor's browser so they can be recognized on the next visit. Your own site sets some. Other companies set others through your site.
- Consent
- The visitor pressing Accept. Until they press it, they have agreed to nothing at all, and therefore their data should not be collected.
- Pre-consent
- The gap between your page opening and the visitor pressing anything. It is usually about one second long. That gap is the only thing Snitch measures.
- Consent banner
- The pop-up that asks about cookies. Its job is to hold trackers back until the visitor answers. Very often it only hides itself when clicked and holds nothing back at all.
- Pixel
- A tracker whose job is advertising. It reports what a visitor looked at so ads can follow them. The Meta Pixel and the TikTok Pixel are the two named most often in lawsuits.
- Session replay
- A tracker that records the visitor's screen: where the mouse went, what was scrolled, what was typed. Someone can play it back later like a video.
- Wiretapping claim
- A lawsuit, usually filed in California, arguing that a third company listened in on a visitor who never agreed to it. Forty-nine have been filed, with more than $153 million in disclosed settlements, plus tens of thousands of demand letters that never reached court.