articleOct 24, 2016Closed access

Online Tracking

SESteven EnglehardtANArvind Narayanan

Princeton University

Indexed incrossref

Abstract

We present the largest and most detailed measurement of online tracking conducted to date, based on a crawl of the top 1 million websites. We make 15 types of measurements on each site, including stateful (cookie-based) and stateless (fingerprinting-based) tracking, the effect of browser privacy tools, and the exchange of tracking data between different sites ("cookie syncing"). Our findings include multiple sophisticated fingerprinting techniques never before measured in the wild. This measurement is made possible by our open-source web privacy measurement tool, OpenWPM, which uses an automated version of a full-fledged consumer browser. It supports parallelism for speed and scale, automatic recovery from…

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Topics & keywords

Topics
Keywords
  • Stateful firewall
  • Computer science
  • Tracking (education)
  • Stateless protocol
  • Instrumentation (computer programming)
  • Web browser
  • Open source
  • World Wide Web
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