What are Web Beacons? What you need to know about tools other than cookies

Web Beacon Introduction

Web beacons are a product of the late 20th century, the rise of the Internet, and appeared in the late 1990s. As more and more people began to use the Internet, organizations needed a mechanism to collect, understand, and apply large-scale user data.

Cookies have been used since 1994. However, cookies have limitations in tracking and tracing user behavior across websites and devices. So web beacons were born. These tiny, transparent images solve some of the limitations of cookies. Web Beacons can work with cookies to gain insight into user behavior and track multiple sites.

What are web beacons?

A web beacon, also known as a pixel tag or transparent GIF, is a tiny image, usually 1 x 1 pixels, that is hidden on a website or in an email. These Web Beacons are designed to communicate with a server when accessing the page or email on which they are placed. They typically collect a variety of data, including the IP location of the device, the URL of the page, the time the page was viewed, and the type of browser used.

When you go to a website with a web beacon or open an email, it sends a request to the server to deliver a tiny transparent graphic image that contains information about the device and browsing behavior.

In fact, web beacons are so common that almost all major companies use them. A previous study found that nearly 80% of the 1 million most popular websites on the web use web beacons or similar tracking technologies.

From their humble beginnings as simple 1×1 pixel images to their current ubiquity, web beacons have changed the way we understand what it means to target online activity. Even though their file and image lengths and widths are small, their impact on our daily online experience is significant - so thinking about whether and how to respond to them is something we should all be doing.

Web Beacon History

1990s

Web Beacons provide a good analytic tracking solution in the evolving web ecosystem of the 1990s. Rather than cookies, web beacons can track and collect user data across different pages and devices. This advantage also allows companies to build products and services based on user behavior and preferences.

2000s, 2010s and 2020s

With advances in technology, web beacons have been enhanced to track user interactions with email and other content in greater detail. With the rise of smartphones, web beacons have also been optimized to track user behavior on websites and apps.

Additionally, the increased awareness of personal privacy and the pursuit of transparency in tracking technologies has led to some changes in the way cookies and Web beacons are used.

Today, web beacons are everywhere on the web, most of the major websites, e.g. Google, Facebook ... use this technology, often in conjunction with other tracking tools, to collect some data on the user's behavior.

Of course, as this technology becomes more and more widely used, privacy laws and regulations have also been formulated by various countries, including the U.S., the European Union, and many countries in Asia to do some restrictions and regulations on cookies and Web beacons.

How do web beacons work?

Web beacons on the web are usually images loaded from an external source. These images are usually 0 ~ 1 pixel in size and therefore invisible to the human eye, hence the name spy pixel. In addition, images can be hidden by setting the CSS display property to none. Less common are implementations using JavaScript beacons, such as the Beacon API: an API that allows requests to be sent to a server without expecting a response.