Oh, the Places You've Been! User Reactions to Longitudinal Transparency About Third-Party Web Tracking and Inferencing

Weinshel, Ben; Wei, Miranda; Mondal, Mainack; Choi, Euirim; Shan, Shawn; Dolin, Claire; Mazurek, Michelle L.; Ur, Blase

doi:10.1145/3319535.3363200

Cited by 33 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…A final concern is that internet users may explicitly opt out of web tracking. However, awareness of tracking and opting out is rare in practice and requires significant user sophistication (Melicher et al 2016, Mathur et al 2018, Weinshel et al 2019, Johnson, Shriver & Du 2020.…”

Section: Data and Measurementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Facebook Shadow Profiles

Aguiar¹,

Peukert²,

Schäfer³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Data is often at the core of digital products and services, especially when related to online advertising. This has made data protection and privacy a major policy concern.When surfing the web, consumers leave digital traces that can be used to build user profiles and infer preferences. We quantify the extent to which Facebook can track web behavior outside of their own platform. The network of engagement buttons, placed on third-party websites, lets Facebook follow users as they browse the web. Tracking users outside its core platform enables Facebook to build shadow profiles. For a representative sample of US internet users, 52 percent of websites visited, accounting for 40 percent of browsing time, employ Facebook's tracking technology. Small differences between Facebook users and non-users are largely explained by differing user activity.The extent of shadow profiling Facebook may engage in is similar on privacy-sensitive domains and across user demographics, documenting the possibility for indiscriminate tracking.

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Section: Data and Measurementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Facebook Shadow Profiles

Aguiar¹,

Peukert²,

Schäfer³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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“…However, people's level of concern about and desire to limit data flows can change once they are made apparent in a form that users can understand. Several studies develop privacy awareness tools, which visualise data flows involved in web and mobile tracking and reflect back to people how their data is used [181,115,182,183,184,185]. Given these tools, study participants were able to articulate more specific and actionable privacy preferences [181,115,182], as well as views on ethical, economic (business models), and political dimensions of the data economy [183,184].…”

Section: End-user Perceptions Expectations and Choicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tracking on the Web, Mobile and the Internet-of-Things

Binns¹

2022

Preprint

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Tracking' is the collection of data about an individual's activity across multiple distinct contexts and the retention, use, or sharing of data derived from that activity outside the context in which it occurred. This paper aims to introduce tracking on the web, smartphones, and the Internet of Things, to an audience with little or no previous knowledge. It covers these topics primarily from the perspective of computer science and humancomputer interaction, but also includes relevant law and policy aspects. Rather than a systematic literature review, it aims to provide an overarching narrative spanning this large research space.Section 1 introduces the concept of tracking. Section 2 provides a short history of the major developments of tracking on the web. Section 3 presents research covering the detection, measurement and analysis of web tracking technologies. Section 4 delves into the countermeasures against web tracking and mechanisms that have been proposed to allow users to control and limit tracking, as well as studies into end-user perspectives on tracking. Section 5 focuses on tracking on 'smart' devices including smartphones and the internet of things. Section 6 covers emerging issues affecting the future of tracking across these different platforms.42 https://perma.cc/UZ7Y-EHLZ 43 https://perma.cc/XL8L-HZJU

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“…Interviews [46] and surveys [47,48] can use natural language to understand users' actual privacy preferences, which tend to contradict observed behavior [49][50][51]. Privacy languages aim to express preferences more precisely than natural language.…”

Section: Privacy Preferencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Privacy Preference Signals: Past, Present and Future

Hils

Woods

Böhme

2021

Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies

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Privacy preference signals are digital representations of how users want their personal data to be processed. Such signals must be adopted by both the sender (users) and intended recipients (data processors). Adoption represents a coordination problem that remains unsolved despite efforts dating back to the 1990s. Browsers implemented standards like the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) and Do Not Track (DNT), but vendors profiting from personal data faced few incentives to receive and respect the expressed wishes of data subjects. In the wake of recent privacy laws, a coalition of AdTech firms published the Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF), which defines an optin consent signal. This paper integrates post-GDPR developments into the wider history of privacy preference signals. Our main contribution is a high-frequency longitudinal study describing how TCF signal gained dominance as of February 2021. We explore which factors correlate with adoption at the website level. Both the number of third parties on a website and the presence of Google Ads are associated with higher adoption of TCF. Further, we show that vendors acted as early adopters of TCF 2.0 and provide two case-studies describing how Consent Management Providers shifted existing customers to TCF 2.0. We sketch ways forward for a pro-privacy signal.

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Oh, the Places You've Been! User Reactions to Longitudinal Transparency About Third-Party Web Tracking and Inferencing

Cited by 33 publications

References 59 publications

Facebook Shadow Profiles

Facebook Shadow Profiles

Tracking on the Web, Mobile and the Internet-of-Things

Privacy Preference Signals: Past, Present and Future

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