The web is watching you: A comprehensive review of web-tracking techniques and countermeasures

Abstract

Web tracking is a commonly-used practice on the Internet devoted to retrieve user information for activities such as personalization or advertisement. These techniques are said to drive the web economy, although they are commonly used to invade users' privacy. In the last years, a general concern raised about web tracking, looking forward to combat it in many ways like regulations, anti-tracking methods and even standardization. In this paper, we analyze and discuss the current techniques for web-tracking as well as techniques for its detection and analysis, and countermeasures to prevent web tracking.

Web Tracking - A Literature Review on the State of Research

“…This understanding of web tracking changed around the year 2006 (Fourie & Bothma, 2007). Since then, it refers to a set of techniques for websites to construct user profiles (Besson et al, 2014;Sanchez-Rola et al, 2016). Web tracking is nowadays also understood as a widespread Internet technique that collects user data for purposes of online advertisement, user authentication, content personalization, advanced website analytics, social network integration, and website development (Sanchez-Rola et al, 2016;…”

“…Against this background, online users are increasingly tracked in real time and across multiple websites (Gomer et al, 2013, Falahrastegar et al, 2014, although presumably with different levels of intensity (Ermakova et al, 2017), and even by emails (Fabian et al, 2015;Bender et al, 2016). Hence, driven by a variety of enabling techniques (Besson et al, 2014;Sanchez-Rola et al, 2016), web tracking has become ubiquitous on the Web (Roesner et al, 2012), across websites and even across devices (Brookman et al, 2017). Besides targeted advertising (Sanchez-Rola et al, 2016; Parra-Arnau, 2017), web tracking can be employed for personalization (Sanchez-Rola et al, 2016;Mayer & Mitchell, 2012;Roesner et al, 2012), advanced web site analytics, social network integration (Mayer & Mitchell, 2012;Roesner et al, 2012), and website development (Fourie & Bothma, 2007).…”

User tracking mechanisms and counter-measures

“…Pop-ups do not interrupt the user instantly and not seen until the covering window is closed. Pop-up window constructs are more difficult to determine which web site spawned them [14]. …”

“…Cookie re-spawning is the procedure of recreating browser cookies from information that has been deleted [14]. With cookie respawning, a corporation can take information store up in flash cookies and use it to reconstruct a cookie in a browser [2].…”

“…If the user does not want to be tracked it is signalized by setting the value of DNT header to 1, DNT header is set to 0 if user allows tracking, and null represents that preference is not expressed by the user [6]. The main advantage of DNT header is that it is generalized and will work for every website and does not require to be set by each advertising network as in opt-out cookies [14]. Since this technology is not standardized, it totally depends on web sites to honor it or not.…”