Related papers: On the Ubiquity of Web Tracking: Insights from a B…
Web tracking by ad networks, social networks, and other third parties is privacy-invasive. To protect users' privacy an increasing number of countries are adopting new privacy laws. However, a major reason why their application on the web…
The presence of third-party tracking on websites has become customary. However, our understanding of the third-party ecosystem is still very rudimentary. We examine third-party trackers from a geographical perspective, observing the…
There is a growing concern about consolidation trends in Internet services, with, for instance, a large fraction of popular websites depending on a handful of third-party service providers. In this paper, we report on a large-scale study of…
Third party tracking allows companies to identify users and track their behaviour across multiple digital services. This paper presents an empirical study of the prevalence of third-party trackers on 959,000 apps from the US and UK Google…
Third party advertising and tracking (A&T) are pervasive across the web, yet user exposure varies significantly with browser choice, browsing location, and hosting jurisdiction. We systematically study how these three factors shape tracking…
This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of global web usage patterns based on data from SimilarWeb, a leading source for estimating web traffic. Leveraging a dataset comprising over 250,000 websites, we estimate the total web traffic…
Online tracking has become of increasing concern in recent years, however our understanding of its extent to date has been limited to snapshots from web crawls. Previous at-tempts to measure the tracking ecosystem, have been done using…
This paper explores tracking and privacy risks on pornography websites. Our analysis of 22,484 pornography websites indicated that 93% leak user data to a third party. Tracking on these sites is highly concentrated by a handful of major…
Web tracking has been extensively studied over the last decade. To detect tracking, previous studies and user tools rely on filter lists. However, it has been shown that filter lists miss trackers. In this paper, we propose an alternative…
Third-party tracking is common on almost all commercially operated websites. Prior work has studied in detail the extent of third-party tracking on the web, detection of third-party trackers, and defending against third-party tracking.…
This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed articles and web…
Web tracking technologies are pervasive and operated by a few large technology companies. This technology, and the use of the collected data has been implicated in influencing elections, fake news, discrimination, and even health decisions.…
Online user privacy and tracking have been extensively studied in recent years, especially due to privacy and personal data-related legislations in the EU and the USA, such as the General Data Protection Regulation, ePrivacy Regulation, and…
Different countries have different privacy regulatory models. These models impact the perspectives and laws surrounding internet privacy. However, little is known about how effective the regulatory models are when it comes to limiting…
Websites are constantly adapting the methods used, and intensity with which they track online visitors. However, the wide-range enforcement of GDPR since one year ago (May 2018) forced websites serving EU-based online visitors to eliminate…
This article provides a quantitative analysis of privacy-compromising mechanisms on 1 million popular websites. Findings indicate that nearly 9 in 10 websites leak user data to parties of which the user is likely unaware; more than 6 in 10…
To what extent are users surveilled on the web, by what technologies, and by whom? We answer these questions by combining passively observed, anonymized browsing data of a large, representative sample of Americans with domain-level data on…
Third-party networks collect vast amounts of data about users via web sites and mobile applications. Consolidations among tracker companies can significantly increase their individual tracking capabilities, prompting scrutiny by competition…
On the modern web, trackers and advertisers frequently construct and monetize users' detailed behavioral profiles without consent. Despite various studies on web tracking mechanisms and advertisements, there has been no rigorous study…
Third party tracking is the practice by which third parties recognize users accross different websites as they browse the web. Recent studies show that 90% of websites contain third party content that is tracking its users across the web.…