The Evolution of Third-Party Web Tracking

Wambach, Tim; Bräunlich, Katharina

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-54433-5_8

Cited by 15 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Evolution of Third-Party Web Tracking Web tracking has been studied extensively, including the prevalence of thirdparty tracking services on websites. Tracking has been identified since 1996, and since then increased in prevalence and complexity [35], with the most popular services covering up to 75 % of websites in 2015 [67] and hundreds of different known tracking services [56] whose use increases with website popularity, and visible differences between regions and website types [25]. Large-scale investigations confirmed that more than half of websites leak user data or load third-party scripts [37].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This raises the question to what extent people tasked with the creation and maintenance of websites are aware of the privacy risks of third-party use and if visitors' privacy is considered both in the decision that leads to the selection of third-party services and in integration itself. Prior work has extensively studied the history [35,67] and prevalence [15] of third-party web tracking and its underlying mechanisms. However, while previous work has investigated privacy considerations in the use of ad networks in mobile apps [42,61], little is known about the decision processes behind the use of third-party services on websites and if website visitors' privacy is considered in the process.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Privacy Rarely Considered: Exploring Considerations in the Adoption of Third-Party Services by Websites

Utz¹,

Amft²,

Degeling³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Modern websites frequently use and embed third-party services to facilitate web development, connect to social media, or for monetization. This often introduces privacy issues as the inclusion of third-party services on a website can allow the third party to collect personal data about the website's visitors. While the prevalence and mechanisms of third-party web tracking have been widely studied, little is known about the decision processes that lead to websites using third-party functionality and whether efforts are being made to protect their visitors' privacy.We report results from an online survey with 395 participants involved in the creation and maintenance of websites. For ten common website functionalities we investigated if privacy has played a role in decisions about how the functionality is integrated, if specific efforts for privacy protection have been made during integration, and to what degree people are aware of data collection through third parties. We find that ease of integration drives third-party adoption but visitor privacy is considered if there are legal requirements or respective guidelines. Awareness of data collection and privacy risks is higher if the collection is directly associated with the purpose for which the third-party service is used.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Privacy Rarely Considered: Exploring Considerations in the Adoption of Third-Party Services by Websites

Utz¹,

Amft²,

Degeling³

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Therefore, the likelihood of Web tracking being privacy-invasive is apparent. Moreover, there is not a diversification but a monopolization of Web tracking (Wambach and Bräunlich, 2016). As the Internet is a decentralized global communication infrastructure, there is no cartel law that can prevent such monopolization, which creates a new power structure, also called platformization (Srnicek, 2016).…”

Section: Threat and Risk Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Linking loose ends: An interdisciplinary privacy and communication model

Bräunlich

Dienlin

Eichenhofer

et al. 2020

New Media & Society

Self Cite

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In the recent decades, privacy scholarship has made significant progress. Most of it was achieved in monodisciplinary works. However, privacy has a deeply interdisciplinary nature. Most importantly, societies as well as individuals experience privacy as being influenced by legal, technical, and social norms and structures. In this article, we hence attempt to connect insights of different academic disciplines into a joint model, an Interdisciplinary Privacy and Communication Model. The model differentiates four different elements: communication context, protection needs, threat and risk analysis, as well as protection enforcement. On the one hand, with this model, we aim to describe how privacy unfolds. On the other hand, the model also prescribes how privacy can be furnished and regulated. As such, the model contributes to a general understanding of privacy as a theoretical guide and offers a practical basis to address new challenges of the digital age.

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“…1) Snapshots: Both datasets are compiled from a few large web crawling snapshots that contain data on hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) headers used for identifying PHP versions. These open data snapshots are provided by the HTTP Archive web crawling project [33], which has also been used in previous research [13] alongside analogous archives [34], [35]. In total, fourteen crawling snapshots are used for compiling the short-run dataset (see Table I).…”

Section: A Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

How PHP Releases Are Adopted in the Wild?

Ruohonen

Leppänen

2017

2017 24th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC)

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This empirical paper examines the adoption of PHP releases in the the contemporary world wide web. Motivated by continuous software engineering practices and software traceability improvements for release engineering, the empirical analysis is based on big data collected by web crawling. According to the empirical results based on discrete time-homogeneous Markov chain (DTMC) analysis, (i) adoption of PHP releases has been relatively uniform across the domains observed, (ii) which tend to also adopt either old or new PHP releases relatively infrequently. Although there are outliers, (iii) downgrading of PHP releases is generally rare. To some extent, (iv) the results vary between the recent history from 2016 to early 2017 and the long-run evolution in the 2010s. In addition to these empirical results, the paper contributes to the software evolution and release engineering research traditions by elaborating the applied use of DTMCs for systematic empirical tracing of online software deployments.

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The Evolution of Third-Party Web Tracking

Cited by 15 publications

References 12 publications

Privacy Rarely Considered: Exploring Considerations in the Adoption of Third-Party Services by Websites

Privacy Rarely Considered: Exploring Considerations in the Adoption of Third-Party Services by Websites

Linking loose ends: An interdisciplinary privacy and communication model

How PHP Releases Are Adopted in the Wild?

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