User tracking mechanisms and counter-measures

Abstract

Abstract:Online customers have lots of alternatives while making a purchase or discovering information on websites. Now a day, tracking services and passive traffic check are widely used to collect knowledge about user's internet activities and interests. For end users, such tracking has significant privacy implications. So, Privacy becomes a sensitive issue which attracts a lot of user's attention. Discrimination is a way to differentiate, isolate, or make a difference. User discrimination is a tactic used to present personalized content to the user, based on user profile. It helps the web owner to improve the content of website. It also ensures that the content caters to a largest population of the user visiting their website. Our major contribution in this paper is to empirically show the tracking mechanism used for user discrimination on the Web, and also provide a defense mechanism against these tracking mechanisms.

The Hidden History of the Like Button: From Decentralized Data to Semantic Enclosure

“…There are no distinct concepts or representations in cookie-based tracking, only statistical probabilities attached to identifiers. To take a straightforward example, a cookie cannot reliabily gather data about a single individual beyond their web-surfing habits, and it is fairly trivial for users to either intentionally or even accidentally restrict their tracking across browsers and even origins (i.e., individual websites) via switching browsers or removing cookies (Ishtiaq et al, 2017). A web cookie only tracks a user's behavior across the Web; it cannot tell in detail whether or not a particular user has a certain friend, who their parents are, their address, political affiliation, sexual orientation, what their bank account balance is, and other more discrete forms of information (except via disturbingly accurate but always error-prone statistical inference).…”

Web Tracking Domain and Possible Privacy Defending Tools: A燣iterature燫eview

“…This section provided a discussion about the current and most popular anti-tracking method, which is content blockers. They are web browser extensions that are used to prevent malicious content, third-party tracking links, and other threats based on blacklists (predefined lists) [4,5]. However, they cannot completely block web tracking, cause performance issues, and are difficult to manage by endusers.…”

“…To achieve this, a literature search is carried out and a total of thirty primary studies are analyzed. Also the authors in [4], Ishtiaq et al presented the possible tracking mechanisms that could be used for uniquely identifying users while browsing the internet or making a purchase. Also, discuss how to defend users against these types of tracking mechanisms.…”