New Free Tool Reveals Who's Tracking You Online

A newly launched free service, DecryptAds, is making it much easier to see who is collecting data or serving ads through the websites and apps we use every day. Websites and apps already publish files such as ads.txt, app-ads.txt, buyers.json and sellers.json that disclose which advertising and data broker companies are allowed to operate on them. However, these files are scattered and hard to interpret on their own.

DecryptAds scrapes these public files continuously and cross-references them, giving a clearer picture of the full advertising ecosystem behind any given site or app. According to Zach Edwards, chief research officer at DecryptAds and a threat researcher at Infoblox, the tool was built with security and privacy in mind rather than just marketing analysis. He says it can help identify the source of malicious ads used to spread malware, flag ad networks based in high-risk countries, and detect the growing number of low-quality, AI-generated websites and apps.

For Australian small businesses, this kind of visibility matters. Many SMBs run websites with third-party ad or analytics scripts without fully knowing which external companies have access to their visitors' data. Tools like DecryptAds offer a way to check this exposure without needing specialist adtech knowledge.