Arjaldo Karaj, Sam Macbeth, Rémi Berson, Josep M. Pujol
2018 · arXiv
Online tracking has become of increasing concern in recent years, however our understanding of its extent to date has been limited to snapshots from web crawls. Previous at-tempts to measure the tracking ecosystem, have been done using instrumented measurement platforms, which are not able to accurately capture how people interact with the web. In this work we present a method for the measurement of tracking in the web through a browser extension, as well as a method for the aggregation and collection of this information which protects the privacy of participants. We deployed this extension to more than 5 million users, enabling measurement across multiple countries, ISPs and browser configurations, to give an accurate picture of real-world tracking. The result is the largest and longest measurement of online tracking to date based on real users, covering 1.5 billion page loads gathered over 12 months. The data, detailing tracking behaviour over a year, is made publicly available to help drive transparency around online tracking practices.
Metadata: arXiv. Abstracts retain their original authors’ rights.
Original HN comments, with labels from simple text rules. A label describes the whole comment and may miss context or irony. Read the discussion to make up your own mind. About the labels
3 selected excerpts · 3 total mentions
This was a very interesting read for me: "WhoTracks .Me: Shedding light on the opaque world of online tracking (2018)" https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.08959 Also this one: "The Internet (Never) Forgets (2017) PDF" https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1037&con...
> 1) Trackers Stats. This feature is powered by another project we run, where we measure the tracking landscape in the web (most popular domains): https://whotracks.me. Details on how that works can be found in our paper [0]. Also - we are flirting with the idea of providing a mode where the ranking is informed by the trackers in the destination site. Would love to hear your thoughts on whether you'd like smth like this. > 2) Page previews (I'm not sure about whether I like that) At the moment it's only a placeholder for a lengthier title and description (if available), but we are planning to use the space for rendering a short summary of the content/media in that site +…
similar sites in terms of content (query-relevant of course). This is more work in progress as we want to make sure content creators are on board. Again: would love to hear your thoughts on that. Disclaimer: I work at Cliqz. [0] WhoTracks .Me: Shedding light on the opaque world of online tracking - https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.08959
There is also a paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.08959 WhoTracks.Me: Monitoring the online tracking landscape at scale Arjaldo Karaj, Sam Macbeth, Rémi Berson, Josep M. Pujol (Submitted on 24 Apr 2018) We present the largest and longest measurement of online tracking to date based on real users. The data, which is made publicly available, is generated from more than 780 million page loads over the course of the last 10 months. Previous attempts to measure the tracking ecosystem, are done via measurement platforms that do not interact with websites the same way a user does. We instrument a crowd-sourced measurement of third-parties across the web via users who consent to…
data collection via a browser extension. The collection is done with privacy-by-design in mind, and introduces no privacy side effects. This approach overcomes limitations of previous work by collecting real web usage across multiple countries, ISP and browser configurations, and on difficult to crawl pages, such as those behind logins, giving a more accurate portrayal of the online-tracking ecosystem. The data, which we plan to continue contributing to and maintain in the future, and WhoTracks.Me website - the living representation of the data, are available for researchers, regulators, journalists, web developers and users to detect tracking behaviours, analyse the tracking landscape, develop efficient tools, devise policies and raise awareness of the negative externalities tracking introduces. We believe this work provides the transparency needed to shine a light on a very opaque industry.
More from the same topics.
Sébastien Bubeck, Varun Chandrasekaran, Ronen Eldan +11
Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have been developing and refining large language models (LLMs) that exhibit remarkable capabilities across a variety of domains and tasks, challenging our understanding of learning and cognition.
A. Pluchino. A. E. Biondo, A. Rapisarda
The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, efforts or risk taking.
David Manheim, Scott Garrabrant
There are several distinct failure modes for overoptimization of systems on the basis of metrics.
Luca Beurer-Kellner, Beat Buesser, Ana-Maria Creţu +11
As AI agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly versatile and capable of addressing a broad spectrum of tasks, ensuring their security has become a critical challenge.