According to research conducted by Crownpeak, a digital experience management firm, many websites owned by Fortune 100 companies, have 1,768 dark web tags, which cause an average website latency of 5.2 seconds.
The worst performing sites having a website latency of 11.1 seconds, which significantly impacted their performance.
Crownpeak grouped the tags into "dark web tags" and "first-party tags."
The dark web tags were injected by first-party tags intentionally or unintentionally, and first-party tags were added directly to the source code of the webpage.
Putting Data at Risk
According to Crownpeak, amongst the 20 Fortune 100 company-owned websites with the worst performance, there was a total of 734 dark web tags added, which is twice as many as the average website.
This is also 7.5 times more than the 18 Fortune best-performing websites.
The difficulty in controlling the growth of dark web tags is shown through the fact that one first-party tag added an average of 1.2 dark web tags on the best performing sites, compared to that of the worst performing sites where it added an average of 3.4.
The tags do not only make the website unmanageable, but they also make them dangerous for the people visiting them.
The tags can help attackers get a hold of the website management layer and its database, and get access to data from fill-out forms, as well as aid in data leak actions.
The other side of the issue is the legislation for the protection of the users. Any user data leaks can end in serious fines for the website owner.
Tag Management a Solution to the Problem
Crownpeak Chief Strategy and Product Officer Darren Guarnaccia stated to media that by looking at a study done by Evidon, which has now become a part of Crownpeak, a large number of companies-specifically 55 percent-were fearful that they went through some form of data leakage by way of third-party code on their website.
As privacy becomes the hot topic of 2019, and there are more and more data privacy regulations all around the world, this research calls attention to the need for substantial tag management.
Guarnaccia stated that intelligent systems are needed in company operations in order to help them in controlling the tags that are operating on their websites.
This will assist them in avoiding data breaches that leave the businesses exposed to huge fines and even more, will improve website data latency, making the user experience much better.
Crownpeak used its platform TagControl to discover this data. TagControl consists of technologies that offer insights on vendors operating on websites due to redirects.
The platform authorizes companies to block vendors or tags and make sure that only approved partners can collect customer data.
