Pages on pxta.com

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

pxta.com is the home of PXTA, short for Pixel Tracking Audit. It’s a free command-line tool that crawls a website in a real browser and writes down what every tracking pixel sends, where it goes, and whether it went before the visitor answered the cookie banner. The report it produces is a list of findings, each one a plain sentence with the request that proves it.

The Name

PXTA is PiXel Tracking Audit. “px” has been shorthand for pixel for as long as screens have had them, from CSS widths to image editors, and a tracking pixel is where this whole kind of tracking started: a one-by-one image, invisible on the page, whose only job was to make the browser call home with some details attached. Today most “pixels” are scripts, but the name stuck, and marketing teams still talk about “installing the pixel”. So the tool that checks them borrows the old shorthand, then says what it does: tracking, audited. The post about the name has the longer story.

Contact

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

pxta.com would like to hear from:

Anyone who ran PXTA on a site. What it found, what it missed, and what you’d want in the report.
Anyone who found a bug. A banner it couldn’t answer, a tracker it didn’t recognise, a finding that’s wrong.
Privacy teams, lawyers and agencies with an audit PXTA nearly fits.

Write to info@pxta.com.

Bug reports are also welcome on GitHub. It helps to include what pxta version prints, your operating system and browser, and the findings.json of the audit. Please remove any personal data the audited site leaked before you send a report.

Download PXTA

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The pxta command is one file with nothing else to install. It uses the Chrome, Chromium or Edge you already have. Each archive below holds it with its license files, and the links always point to the latest release.

System	Download
Linux, x86-64	pxta_linux_amd64.tar.gz
Linux, ARM64	pxta_linux_arm64.tar.gz
macOS, Apple silicon	pxta_darwin_arm64.tar.gz
macOS, Intel	pxta_darwin_amd64.tar.gz
Windows, x86-64	pxta_windows_amd64.zip

Checksums are in SHA256SUMS. Every release is listed on GitHub.

Install

On Linux or macOS:

Quick Start

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

PXTA audits the tracking on a website and writes a report you can read, file or send on. This page takes you from nothing to your first report in a few minutes.

1. Get PXTA and a Browser

Download the archive for your system from the download page, unpack it and put pxta somewhere on your PATH. PXTA drives a browser you already have: Google Chrome, Chromium or Microsoft Edge. Check it’s all there:

Reference

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This page lists what PXTA looks for, how it rates what it finds, and every option. The same reference is in the README on GitHub.

The Three Passes

When a site shows a consent banner, PXTA loads every page three times, with a fresh browser profile for each pass:

Pass	What PXTA does first	A tracker sending data here means
Banner not answered	Nothing: the banner is left alone	it fired before consent
After reject	Rejects on the start page	it ignored the visitor’s “no”
After accept	Accepts on the start page	this is what the site sends with consent

With no banner, each page is loaded once, and the report says the site never asked.

Sample Reports

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

These are real PXTA reports, made by the release’s own tests against four made-up businesses. The sites, the banners and the tags are stand-ins built for testing PXTA, so nothing here describes a real company. Each one is the unedited report.html, with its findings.json and requests.har next to it in the test results on GitHub.

Site	Banner	What the report shows	Story
Harbor & Pine Outfitters, an outdoor-gear shop	OneTrust	Tags pasted into the template ignore the banner. The order confirmation page puts the customer’s email in its address, and three trackers send it.	The order confirmation page
Cedar Valley Clinic, a family practice	Cookiebot	Google Analytics waits for consent. TikTok and LinkedIn don’t, and get the condition pages and a search for “anxiety medication”.	The clinic’s condition pages
Marlow Home Loans, a lender	Usercentrics, in a closed shadow root	Tags wait for an answer, then load on “Deny” too. Consent Mode reports granted after the reject.	The lender’s reject button
Tidewater Bakery, a bakery	Didomi	Set up correctly: quiet before an answer, quiet after reject, sends after accept.	The correct setup

How to Read One

Start with the tiles at the top: how many findings are high, medium, low and for information. Then read the box under them, which says which banner PXTA found and how it answered it in each pass.