Name
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
Online tracking is evolving from browser- and device tracking to people-tracking. As users are increasingly accessing the Internet from multiple devices this new paradigm of tracking in most cases for purposes of advertising is aimed at crossing the boundary between a user's individual devices and browsers. It establishes a person-centric view of a user across devices and seeks to combine the input from various data sources into an individual and comprehensive user profile. By its very nature such cross-device tracking can principally reveal a complete picture of a person and, thus, become more privacy-invasive than the siloed tracking via HTTP cookies or other traditional and more limited tracking mechanisms In this study we are exploring cross-device tracking techniques as well as their privacy implications.Particularly, we demonstrate a method to detect the occurrence of cross-device tracking, and, based on a cross-device tracking dataset that we collected from 126 Internet users, we explore the prevalence of cross-device trackers on mobile and desktop devices. We show that the similarity of IP addresses and Internet history for a user's devices gives rise to a matching rate of F-1 = 0.91 for connecting a mobile to a desktop device in our dataset. This finding is especially noteworthy in light of the increase in learning power that cross-device companies may achieve by leveraging user data from more than one device. Given these privacy implications of cross-device tracking we also examine compliance with applicable self-regulation for 40 cross-device companies and find that some are not transparent about their practices. |
Year | Venue | Field |
|---|---|---|
2017 | PROCEEDINGS OF THE 26TH USENIX SECURITY SYMPOSIUM (USENIX SECURITY '17) | Internet privacy,Computer security,Computer science,Cross device,Privacy analysis |
DocType | Citations | PageRank |
Conference | 7 | 0.48 |
References | Authors | |
0 | 5 | |
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sebastian Zimmeck | 1 | 67 | 5.45 |
| Jie S. Li | 2 | 7 | 0.48 |
| Hyungtae Kim | 3 | 7 | 0.82 |
| Steven M. Bellovin | 4 | 2312 | 276.72 |
| Tony Jebara | 5 | 2078 | 196.32 |