State of Online Tracking
Really interesting research: “Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis,” by Steven Englehardt and Arvind Narayanan:
Abstract: We present the largest and most detailed measurement of online tracking conducted to date, based on a crawl of the top 1 million websites. We make 15 types of measurements on each site, including stateful (cookie-based) and stateless (fingerprinting-based) tracking, the effect of browser privacy tools, and the exchange of tracking data between different sites (“cookie syncing”). Our findings include multiple sophisticated fingerprinting techniques never before measured in the wild.
This measurement is made possible by our web privacy measurement tool, OpenWPM, which uses an automated version of a full-fledged consumer browser. It supports parallelism for speed and scale, automatic recovery from failures of the underlying browser, and comprehensive browser instrumentation. OpenWPM is open-source1 and has already been used as the basis of seven published studies on web privacy and security.
Summary in this blog post.
stine • May 23, 2016 8:57 AM
They ran this from AWS. I don’t blame them, it probably lowered their costs, but unless companies have started running Websense (or other) proxies in AWS, don’t you think that websites would know that queries from AWS are either 1) hacking or 2) studies like this one?
I also note that the study was strictly client-side. and that no attempt was made to deduce the existence of any carrier-cookies a la Verizon Wireless. Nor did I see Incapsula cookies mentioned.