What Your Phone Is Handing Out Before You've Said a Word

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series.We all know the basic deal by now. Meta wants your data to sell ads. Google wants your data to sell ads. A dozen other companies you've never heard of want your data to sell to the people selling ads. And we know Apple tried to draw a line with App Tracking Transparency — the prompt that asks whether an app is allowed to track you across other apps and websites. It matters. It caused genuine chaos for the mobile ad industry when it launched. Meta's own CFO estimated ATT would cost the company around $10 billion in ad revenue in 2022 — which is at least somewhat satisfying.And then we watched the workarounds appear. The most infamous was the Meta Pixel — a tracking script embedded on third-party websites that operated at the browser level, completely outside ATT's scope. Because ATT governs app-to-app tracking, not what happens when you open a web browser. The Markup found it running on 33 of the top 100 hospitals in the country —…