Wysor privacy
Why do you get ads for the exact thing you just looked at?
It feels like your phone is listening. It almost never is. The real reason is quieter: a tiny, invisible image on the pages you visit, called a tracking pixel.
A tracking pixel is a one-by-one image you never see. To load it, your browser has to call the company that owns it, usually Google or Facebook, and that call tells them which page you are on. They already know it is you, so the thing you just read comes back as the advert you see next, somewhere else entirely.
Wysor carries none of these pixels. What you look at here, and what you type into it, never goes to Google or Facebook, because nothing on the page is there to send it.
The loop, start to finish
How what you read turns into the ad you see.
No microphone is involved, and nothing needs to be clicked. Four quiet steps run every time you open a page that carries a pixel.
A pair of running shoes. Or your symptoms. Or a way out of debt.
You read the page. You did not sign up, you did not click an advert, and nothing asked your permission.
<img src="https://ads.example.com/p.gif?id=8f2a" width="1" height="1" alt="" />
The same pixel sits on thousands of other sites, all reporting to the same company.
So it recognises you across every one of them. This visit does not land on a stranger, it lands on the profile they have been building of you.
The thing you looked at becomes the ad you see.
On a different site, in a different app, hours later. It was never your microphone listening. It was the pixel on the page.
A request, not a picture
What a tracking pixel actually sends, and to whom.
The pixel shows nothing, but the request that fetches it carries a full description of your visit. How much more it picks up depends on how it was set up, and some are configured to take what people type into forms. On a page about a diagnosis, a legal question or money trouble, that is the private part.
The picture of you, getting sharper
All of it goes to companies like Google and Facebook, who already hold a profile of you built from thousands of other websites. Every visit is matched to that profile and makes it sharper.
Google and Facebook get nothing about your visit, your messages, or your workspace, because we never put their pixel on the page.
Small, not harmless
One pixel looks like nothing. Here is what it has added up to.
Pixels have sent health details to advertisers
The Markup found the same kind of tracking pixel on hospital and health-provider websites, quietly sending details of what visitors looked up back to an advertising company. A page about a condition is a sentence about a person, and the pixel does not know the difference.
The Markup, Jun 2022Sharing data through a pixel now draws fines
The US Federal Trade Commission has taken action against companies for letting advertising pixels pass on people’s sensitive information without real consent, treating the pixel as the mechanism of the harm. A tracker being invisible has stopped being the same as it being allowed.
FTC, Feb 2023A page that loads no pixel has nothing to send
Consent banners, settings and policies all manage a tracker that is already there. The cleaner answer is not to load one. A Wysor page carries no advertising pixel, so there is no request to a third party, no profile to feed, and nothing to configure. You can confirm it in a minute with the tool below.
Easy to check
You do not have to take our word for any of this.
Scan any page for trackers in about a minute.
The newsroom The Markup built a free tool called Blacklight. Paste in any web address and it lists the advertising trackers that page loads, so you can see which companies a page reports you to. It works on any site, ours included.
It matters most where the page itself is private.
The parts people ask twice about
Why do I get ads for something right after I look at it?+
Because the page you looked at almost certainly carried a tracking pixel from an advertising company, and that pixel told them you were there. They already recognise you from thousands of other sites, so the thing you just read gets matched to your profile and shown back to you as an advert, often on a completely different site or app. It is not a coincidence, and it is not your microphone.
Is my phone listening to me?+
Almost certainly not, and it rarely needs to. The far more common explanation is tracking pixels and the profile advertising companies keep on you. Between the pages you visit, the things you search, and who your contacts are, they can predict what you are interested in without ever turning on a microphone. It feels like listening because the guess is so accurate.
What is a tracking pixel?+
A tracking pixel is a tiny image, usually one transparent pixel wide and one tall, placed on a web page. You never see it, but your browser still has to fetch it, and fetching it means asking a server for the file. That request is the report. The moment the pixel loads, the company that owns it, often Google or Facebook, learns that you were here.
How does a tracking pixel actually work?+
It works by turning a normal request into a signal. To draw an image, your device sends a request to wherever that image lives, and the request carries your IP address, the page you are on, the link that sent you, your browser and device, and any cookie already set for that company. So a one-pixel picture that shows nothing on screen quietly hands over a full description of your visit. Nothing needs to be clicked.
How is a tracking pixel different from a cookie?+
A cookie is stored on your device. A pixel is the request that reads or sets it. The two work together: the pixel fires on every page it sits on and carries the cookie back to the same company each time, which is how a profile is stitched together across the different websites you visit. Deleting cookies helps, but the pixel still records the visit itself.
Can a tracking pixel read what I type?+
A plain pixel reports the visit, not your keystrokes. But a pixel is often only the visible tip of a larger script from the same company, and how much that script collects depends on how it was set up. Some are configured to capture what people enter into forms. On a page about a diagnosis, a legal problem, or money, that is exactly the part you would not want sent anywhere.
How do I know if a page has tracking pixels?+
You can check any web address in about a minute. The newsroom The Markup built a free tool called Blacklight that loads a page the way a browser would and lists the advertising trackers it finds. It works on any site, including ours. Browser extensions that block trackers, and browsers that block them by default, are the other everyday defence.
Does Wysor put tracking pixels on its pages?+
No advertising tracker loads on a Wysor page, from Google, Meta, or anyone else, and you can confirm that yourself with Blacklight. Google and Facebook get nothing about your visit. Inside the product, your conversations are covered by zero data retention and are never used to train a model.