Automated Measurements of Cross-Device Tracking

Been Here Already? Detecting Synchronized Browsers in the Wild

“…Cross-device tracking (CDT) comprises of a set of technologies and methods that are used to track users across multiple devices, such as mobile devices, desktop computers, laptops, and connected TVs [12]. It works by matching activity across different devices to the same user who performs them by using shared identifiers, that are in use on each user's device [8].…”

“…Cross-device tracking could be deterministic or probabilistic. Deterministic CDT utilizes 1st-party login services that require user authentication, while in probabilistic CDT 3rd parties attempt to identify which devices belong to the same user based on network access data, and common behavioral patterns in browsing history [12]. The existing literature about crossdevice tracking is reported in the rest of this section.…”

“…Moghaddam et al [11] examined the advertising and tracking ecosystem of OTT streaming devices. Finally, Solomos et al [12] designed Talon, a practical framework for CDT measurements.…”

“…Tracking the user across multiple devices is known as cross-device tracking [8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. To the best of our knowledge, cross-device tracking so far can use several signals (e.g., Bluetooth) but not browsers.…”

“…The core characteristic of crossdevice tracking is the detection of the same user in multiple devices. However, the major contribution is that, in contrast to other cross-device tracking works [8,9,10,11,12,13,14], we use the browser signals emitted by each synchronized device. For performing the actual tracking, we reconstruct different sessions based on their requested resources and timestamps.…”