Untangling the Web by tracking our trackers

10^th February 2022, 16:00
Nishanth Sastry
University of Surrey

Abstract

The Web has evolved into a complex ecosystem — visiting one website may actually involve a large number of other third party domains such as advertisers and analytics companies, which place cookies in our browsers. Many of these third parties are present on several common websites, and are therefore able to track users’ visits across websites and gain visibility into their browsing patterns. We have created a browser extension that helps users understand how their privacy may be compromised by third parties. Over 10,000 users across the world have deployed this extension. Based on this, we present an analysis of the current state of privacy on the Web in over 85 different countries. We find, for example, that Chinese users fare better than users in countries like the UK, US and Canada. We also develop a metric called `tangle factor’, to quantify the interconnectedness of independent first party websites, and use this to measure and compare the efficacy of different privacy measures (e.g., ad blockers). Finally, we examine the impact of GDPR and find that this does not seem to have had an appreciable impact, perhaps because users are choosing default suggestions for allowed cookies.