Browsing behavior exposes identities on the Web
Computers and Society
2024-06-17 v2 Information Retrieval
Social and Information Networks
Physics and Society
Applications
Abstract
How easy is it to uniquely identify a person based solely on their web browsing behavior? Here we show that when people navigate the Web, their online traces produce fingerprints that identify them. Merely the four most visited web domains are enough to identify 95% of the individuals. These digital fingerprints are stable and render high re-identifiability. We demonstrate that we can re-identify 80% of the individuals in separate time slices of data. Such a privacy threat persists even with limited information about individuals' browsing behavior, reinforcing existing concerns around online privacy.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2312.15489,
title = {Browsing behavior exposes identities on the Web},
author = {Marcos Oliveira and Junran Yang and Daniel Griffiths and Denis Bonnay and Juhi Kulshrestha},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.15489},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
13 pages, 1 figure