Differential Tracking Across Topical Webpages of Indian News Media

Vekaria, Yash; Agarwal, Vibhor; Agarwal, Pankaj; Mahapatra, Sangeeta; Muthiah, Sakthi Balan; Sastry, Nishanth; Kourtellis, Nicolas

doi:10.1145/3447535.3462497

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Recently, there have been concerns that such data is being exploited for commercial and other more malicious ends. For example, detailed online historical profiles of the users are created by various third-parties [22][23][24], mainly to target ads and generate revenue [1,2,45]. It also poses various privacy issues for the users online [8].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

"Way back then": A Data-driven View of 25+ years of Web Evolution

Agarwal,

Sastry

2022

Preprint

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Since the inception of the first web page three decades back, the Web has evolved considerably, from static HTML pages in the beginning to the dynamic web pages of today, from mainly the text-based pages of the 1990s to today's multimedia rich pages, etc.. Although much of this is known anecdotally, to our knowledge, there is no quantitative documentation of the extent and timing of these changes. This paper attempts to address this gap in the literature by looking at the top 100 Alexa websites for over 25 years from the Internet Archive or the "Wayback Machine", archive.org. We study the changes in popularity, from Geocities and Yahoo! in the mid-to-late 1990s to the likes of Google, Facebook, and Tiktok of today. We also look at different categories of websites and their popularity over the years and find evidence for the decline in popularity of news and education-related websites, which have been replaced by streaming media and social networking sites. We explore the emergence and relative prevalence of different MIME-types (text vs. image vs. video vs. javascript and json) and study whether the use of text on the Internet is declining. CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems → World Wide Web.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

"Way back then": A Data-driven View of 25+ years of Web Evolution

Agarwal,

Sastry

2022

Preprint

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“…Among USA news websites, Right-leaning websites track users more and have high cookie synchronization within the partisan group websites (Agarwal et al 2020b). Having said that, less is known about the tracking ecosystem of Indian news media homepages, or their topical subpages (Vekaria et al 2021). There are studies in online engagement (including social media) showing polarization and media bias, but none covers the exposure of user data to the tracking world (Mahapatra and Plagemann 2019;Starbird 2017;Qayyum et al 2018).…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Under the Spotlight: Web Tracking in Indian Partisan News Websites

Agarwal

Vekaria

Agarwal

et al. 2021

ICWSM

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India is experiencing intense political partisanship and sectarian divisions. The paper performs, to the best of our knowledge, the first comprehensive analysis on the Indian online news media with respect to tracking and partisanship. We build a dataset of 103 online, mostly mainstream news websites. With the help of two experts, alongside data from the Media Ownership Monitor, we label these websites according to their partisanship (Left, Right, or Centre). We study and compare user tracking on these sites with different metrics: numbers of cookies, cookie synchronization, device fingerprinting, and invisible pixel-based tracking. We find that Left and Centre websites serve more cookies than Right-leaning websites. However, through cookie synchronization, more user IDs are synchronized in Left websites than Right or Centre. Canvas fingerprinting is used similarly by Left and Right, and less by Centre. Invisible pixel-based tracking is 50% more intense in Centre-leaning websites than Right, and 25% more than Left. Desktop versions of news websites deliver more cookies than their mobile counterparts. A handful of third-parties are tracking users in most websites in this study. This paper demonstrates the intensity of Web tracking happening in Indian news websites and discusses implications for research on overall privacy of users visiting partisan news websites in India.

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