A specific focus of this investigation is to determine which corporate bodies are receiving information from health-related Web pages. While it is possible to programmatically detect requests to third-party domains, it is not always clear who belongs to the requested domains. By examining domain registration records, I have been able to pair seemingly obscure domain names (for example, “2mdn.net,” “fbcdn.net”) with their corporate owners (for example, Google, Facebook). This process has allowed me to follow the data trail back to the corporations that are the recipients of user data. To date, the literature has given much more attention to technical
mechanisms, and much less to the underlying corporate dynamics. This fresh analytical focus highlights the power of a handful of corporate giants.