At The Markup, the development of Blacklight shines a light on the importance of user privacy. However, a persistent Timeout Bug limited its effectiveness, especially on sites laden with trackers. The scanning tool, which evaluates websites for user-tracking technologies, would often time out before it could gather useful data. Addressing this issue required assembling a team of engineers and interns to analyze the underlying code, aiming to extend scanning durations or adapt methodologies to successfully collect comprehensive data for privacy investigations.
At The Markup, we developed Blacklight to protect readers' privacy by surfacing user-tracking technologies in real time, but faced challenges with timeout errors during scans.
To address the timeout bug in Blacklight that disrupted scans on cookie-heavy sites, we gathered a dedicated team of engineers and interns to analyze the code and improve functionality.
The timeout errors in Blacklight scans were significant obstacles, aborting the data collection process prematurely. We needed to keep Blacklight collecting data longer.
Collaboration among engineers and interns at The Markup was critical for addressing the timeout bug, fostering a team environment to troubleshoot and innovate.
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