Tracking website data-collection and privacy practices with the iWatch web crawler

Jensen, Carlos; Sarkar, Chandan Kumar; Jensen, Christian Damsgaard; Potts, Colin

doi:10.1145/1280680.1280686

Cited by 23 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Basic statistics indicate that our results are in line with previous, similar endeavors [7] [8]. We omit them for brevity's sake.…”

Section: IIsupporting

confidence: 88%

Zombie-cookies: Case studies and mitigation

Sörensen

2013

8th International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions (ICITST-2013)

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Putting the user in charge of their online identity is a necessary precondition for privacy on the web. This requires the ability to manage identifying information that remote parties store in data repositories on the user's device. We performed a crawl of thousands of popular websites with the intention of assessing the prevalence of various problematic patterns of client side data storage. The focus of this paper is on techniques that make use of the browser cache, especially when they impede active identity management by the user. From these results, we derive a novel privacy-enhancing policy for client-side data storage -self-destructing identifiers -improving the current de facto standard. This policy has already seen some adoption in practice in the form of a Firefox add-on that we developed as a proof of concept.

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“…Basic statistics indicate that our results are in line with previous, similar endeavors [7] [8]. We omit them for brevity's sake.…”

Section: IIsupporting

confidence: 88%

Zombie-cookies: Case studies and mitigation

Sörensen

2013

8th International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions (ICITST-2013)

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“…They also proposed a categorization technique using a DNS SOA record we adopt in our system. Carlos et al [6] reported measurement results of WebCrawler. They crawled 15 months worth of data and obtained 240,000 pages from over 24,000 domains across 47 countries.…”

Section: Measurementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

MindYourPrivacy: Design and implementation of a visualization system for third-party Web tracking

Takano

Ohta

Takahashi

et al. 2014

2014 Twelfth Annual International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust

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Third-party Web tracking is a serious privacy issue. Advertisement sites and social networking sites stealthily collect users' Web browsing history for purposes such as targeted advertising or predicting trends. Unfortunately, very few Internet users realize this, and their privacy has been infringed upon because they have no means of recognizing the situation. In this paper we present the design and implementation of a system called MindYourPrivacy that visualizes third-party Web tracking and clarifies the entities threatening users' privacy. The implementation adopts deep packet inspection, DNS-SOA-recordbased categorization, and HTTP-referred graphical analysis to visualize collectors of Web browsing histories without device dependency. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proof-ofconcept implementation, we conducted an experiment in an IT technology camp, where 129 attendees discussed IT technologies for four days, The experiment's results revealed that visualizing Web tracking effectively influences users' perception of privacy. Analysis of the user data we collected at the camp also revealed that MCODE clustering and some features derived from graph theory are useful for detecting advertising sites that potentially collect user information by Web tracking for their own purposes.

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“…Jensen, et al [17] developed a web crawler that hunted for the presence of trackers and other user tracking mechanisms. Others have studied the prevalence and mechanisms by which user information can be collected [20].…”

Section: B Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Beyond simply analytics, advertising networks have been expanding their capabilities with the goal of most efficiently presenting effective ads to users [17], [20]. These advancements have come in many forms, from context aware advertising to the building of user profiles to deliver custom ad experiences [11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Synthoid: Endpoint User Profile Control

Flores

Kuzmanovic

2014

2014 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conferences on Web Intelligence (WI) and Intelligent Agent Technologies (IAT)

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Abstract-Web tracking is a practice that has grown in scope and complexity as the Internet has expanded. In particular, advertising networks have been continually advancing web tracking in order to gather the most information on users. On the other hand, users have often reacted negatively to tracking schemes, expressing concern about their lack of control. We present Synthoid, a system which returns control to users, without a need for tracker cooperation or broad adoption.Synthoid achieves this by actively fetching content of a selected set of topics, imprinting the tracking network profile for the user with these topics. It eliminates the need for users to place trust in web trackers by directly controlling the signal trackers measure, without inconveniencing users. Additionally, as traffic is generated directly from the users' machines, Synthoid is able to function with any method of tracking, even those which use advanced techniques.We examine the effectiveness of Synthoid with real web trackers. We demonstrate that it is successfully able to imprint a target profile with low volume and when faced with significant interference. Finally, we show that it is able to entirely alter browsing profiles when run alongside user traces. The key behind Synthoid's performance is a strong, artificial, yet carefully constructed and semantically determined, signal.

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Tracking website data-collection and privacy practices with the iWatch web crawler

Cited by 23 publications

References 17 publications

Zombie-cookies: Case studies and mitigation

Zombie-cookies: Case studies and mitigation

MindYourPrivacy: Design and implementation of a visualization system for third-party Web tracking

Synthoid: Endpoint User Profile Control

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