Cookie-based privacy issues on google services

Toubiana, Vincent; Verdot, Vincent; Christophe, Benoît

doi:10.1145/2133601.2133619

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Toubiana et al [12] have demonstrated that Google web search session cookies can expose personal user data. They claim that the cookies capture as much as 80% of a user's search/click history.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analyzing Mobile Device Ads to Identify Users

Govindaraj

Verma

Gupta

2016

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology

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User browsing behavior is tracked by search providers in order to construct activity profiles that are used to fine-tune searches and present user-specific advertisements. When a search input matches a commercial product or service offering, ads based on the previously-saved interests, likes and dislikes are displayed. The number of web searches from mobile devices has exceeded those conducted from desktops. Mobile devices are being used for critical business tasks such as e-commerce, banking transactions, video conferences, email communications and confidential data storage. Companies are moving towards mobile-app-only strategies and advertisers are displaying ads on mobile apps as well. Mobile device ads can often reveal information such as location, gender, age and other valuable data about users. This chapter describes a methodology for extracting and analyzing ads on mobile devices to retrieve user-specific information, reconstruct a user profile and predict user identity. The results show that the methodology can identify a user even if he or she uses the same device, multiple devices, different networks or follows different usage patterns. The methodology can be used to support a digital forensic readiness framework for mobile devices. Additionally, it has applications in context-based security and proactive and reactive digital forensic investigations.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analyzing Mobile Device Ads to Identify Users

Govindaraj

Verma

Gupta

2016

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology

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“…Because of their use in user tracking techniques, cookies have raised many privacy concerns. This module examines cookies in depth and demonstrates how cookies can be used to store and track various user data what may lead to privacy violations (Toubiana, Verdot, & Christophe, 2012).…”

Section: Module 2: Cookies and Privacy Concernsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enhancing Privacy Education with a Technical Emphasis in IT Curriculum

Peltsverger

Zheng

2016

JITE:IIP

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The paper describes the development of four learning modules that focus on technical details of how a person’s privacy might be compromised in real-world scenarios. The paper shows how students benefited from the addition of hands-on learning experiences of privacy and data protection to the existing information technology courses. These learning modules raised students’ awareness of potential breaches of privacy as a user as well as a developer. The demonstration of a privacy breach in action helped students to design, configure, and implement technical solutions to prevent privacy violations. The assessment results demonstrate the strength of the technical approach.

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“…Such ads may use the cookies to enable tar-geted advertising and allow profile building for the tracker and the website operator. Such third party cookies are often used to store user identifiers, especially by ad-tech companies, party cookies, to track users across the Web [42,45,47]. To oppose these threats browsers [2,34], browser addons and other tools aim to block especially third-party cookies to decrease the privacy impact on users [10,18,32].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Understanding First-Party Cookie Tracking in the Field

Demir¹,

Theis²,

Urban³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Third-party web tracking is a common, and broadly used technique on the Web. Almost every step of users' is tracked, analyzed, and later used in different use cases (e.g., online advertisement). Different defense mechanisms have emerged to counter these practices (e.g., the recent step of browser vendors to ban all third-party cookies). However, all of these countermeasures only target third-party trackers, and ignore the first party because the narrative is that such monitoring is mostly used to improve the utilized service (e.g., analytical services).In this paper, we present a large-scale measurement study that analyzes tracking performed by the first party but utilized by a third party to circumvent standard tracking preventing techniques (i.e., the first party performs the tracking in the name of the third party). We visit the top 15,000 websites to analyze first-party cookies used to track users and a technique called "DNS CNAME cloaking", which can be used by a third party to place firstparty cookies. Using this data, we show that 76% sites in our dataset effectively utilize such tracking techniques, and in a long-running analysis we show that the usage of such cookies increased by more than 50% over 2021. Furthermore, we shed light on the ecosystem utilizing first-party trackers, and find that the established trackers already use such tracking, presumably to avoid tracking blocking.

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Cookie-based privacy issues on google services

Cited by 6 publications

References 4 publications

Analyzing Mobile Device Ads to Identify Users

Analyzing Mobile Device Ads to Identify Users

Enhancing Privacy Education with a Technical Emphasis in IT Curriculum

Towards Understanding First-Party Cookie Tracking in the Field

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