Personal Data on pxta.com

A Hashed Email Address Still Identifies Someone, Here Is How Ad Networks Match It

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Almost every ad network now offers a way to send customer details from a website “securely hashed”. Meta calls it advanced matching, Google calls it enhanced conversions, Pinterest calls it enhanced match. The tag runs the visitor’s email through SHA-256 and sends a 64-character string instead of the address.

That sounds like anonymisation. It isn’t, and the networks don’t claim it is. The whole point of the feature is to find the person.

How Site Search Terms Leak to Ad Trackers Through the Page Address

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A site’s own search box is where visitors type what they actually want. On a pharmacy it’s a medicine. On a lender it’s “bankruptcy”. On a clinic it’s a symptom. Nobody types those into a page title, but they type them into search.

Most sites put the search in the page address: /search?q=pregnancy+test. And nearly every tracker sends the page address with every event. Put the two together and the search goes to every ad network on the page.