Privacy awareness about information leakage

Abstract

The task of protecting users' privacy is made more difficult by their attitudes towards information disclosure without full awareness and the economics of the tracking and advertising industry. Even after numerous press reports and widespread disclosure of leakages on the Web and on popular Online Social Networks, many users appear not be fully aware of the fact that their information may be collected, aggregated and linked with ambient information for a variety of purposes. Past attempts at alleviating this problem have addressed individual aspects of the user's data collection. In this paper we move towards a comprehensive and efficient client-side tool that maximizes users' awareness of the extent of their information leakage. We show that such a customizable tool can help users to make informed decisions on controlling their privacy footprint.

Cross-Device Tracking: Measurement and Disclosures

“…While several previous studies [9][10][11][12] have considered data collection online, including third-party data collection, we are unaware of any prior studies that considered such collection in the context of cross-device tracking across such a large number of sites. Other work [13][14][15][16] has focused on third-party data collection across mobile applicatons (as opposed to web browsers); while we do not measure leakage of information through apps, many of the same privacy interests are implicated.…”

Third-Party Tracking on the Web: A Swedish Perspective

“…Others have considered the tracking when following the (non-sponsored) links provided by popular search engines [9], suggested taxonomies for third-party tracking [27], and developed tools to measure and protect against third-party tracking [17], [18]. In contrast to the above works, we leverage Disconnect's classification of trackers, group domains by organizational ownership, and compare the third-party resource usage and known trackers observed across different services when using HTTP or HTTPS.…”

“…Tracker identification: Public lists of known trackers typically are incomplete and out-of-date [13], [17]. Since potentially any external resource can be used for third-party tracking it is difficult to quantify exactly how much third-party tracking takes place.…”

“…The second largest category is content. Disconnect.me does not block this category by default, suggesting that users running Disconnect's software would still be tracked by known trackers on at least 60-70% of the websites; likely more, given the limitations of blocking lists [17]. Advertising and analytics are particularly common among Swedish media domains and globally popular domains ("Top-10K globally").…”

“…With active tracking, third-party scripts and plugins embedded within the visited websites are typically used to extract and collect information about a user's every click, the time spent on each page, and information that can help uniquely identify each browser and client. While some trackers allow advanced fingerprinting through collection of client-side information, much tracking is achieved through server-side tracking of the download of relatively simple third-party contents such as CSS files, customized fonts, or javascript libraries that do not include tracking code themselves [1], [17], [18], [22], [27]. With passive tracking, user activities are typically extracted from traffic logs collected through traffic monitoring within a network or at a cloud-operated data center hosting some of the content.…”