Abstract
In the early age of the internet users enjoyed a large level of anonymity. At the time web pages were just hypertext documents; almost no personalisation of the user experience was offered. The Web today has evolved as a world wide distributed system following specific architectural paradigms. On the web now, an enormous quantity of user generated data is shared and consumed by a network of applications and services, reasoning upon users expressed preferences and their social and physical connections. Advertising networks follow users’ browsing habits while they surf the web, continuously collecting their traces and surfing patterns. We analyse how users tracking happens on the web by measuring their online footprint and estimating how quickly advertising networks are able to profile users by their browsing habits.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Open directory project. http://www.dmoz.com
Boda, K., Földes, A.M., Gulyás, G.G., Imre, S.: User tracking on the web via cross-browser fingerprinting. In: Laud, P. (ed.) NordSec 2011. LNCS, vol. 7161, pp. 31–46. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Castelluccia, C.: Behavioural tracking on the internet: a technical perspective. In: Gutwirth, S., Leenes, R., De Hert, P., Poullet, Y. (eds.) European Data Protection: In Good Health?, pp. 21–33. Springer, The Netherlands (2012)
Eckersley, P.: Panopticlick (2011)
Getoor, L., Machanavajjhala, A.: Entity resolution: theory, practice and open challenges. Proc. VLDB Endowment 5(12), 2018–2019 (2012)
Gomer, R., Mendes Rodrigues, E., Milic-Frayling, N., Schraefel, M.: Networkanalysis of third party tracking: user exposure to tracking cookies through search. In: 2013 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conferences on Web Intelligence (WI) and Intelligent Agent Technologies (IAT), vol. 1, pp. 549–556. IEEE (2013)
Inc., G.: Google Analytics cookie usage on websites (2015). https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/cookie-usage
Michael, K., Clarke, R.: Location and tracking of mobile devices: Überveillance stalks the streets. Comput. Law Secur. Rev. 29(3), 216–228 (2013)
Mowery, K., Bogenreif, D., Yilek, S., Shacham, H.: Fingerprinting information in Javascript implementations. In: Proceedings of W2SP, vol. 2 (2011)
Parra-Arnau, J., Perego, A., Ferrari, E., Forné, J., Rebollo-Monedero, D.: Privacy-preserving enhanced collaborative tagging. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 26(1), 180–193 (2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2012.248
Parra-Arnau, J., Rebollo-Monedero, D., Forné, J., Muñoz, J.L., Esparza, O.: Optimal tag suppression for privacy protection in the semantic Web. Data. Knowl. Eng. 81–82, 46–66 (2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.datak.2012.07.004
Rao, A., Schaub, F., Sadeh, N.: What do they know about me? Contents and concerns of online behavioral profiles (2015)
Rose, S., Engel, D., Cramer, N., Cowley, W.: Automatic keyword extraction from individual documents. In: Text Mining, pp. 1–20 (2010)
Veeningen, M., Piepoli, A., Zannone, N.: Are on-line personae really unlinkable? In: Garcia-Alfaro, J., Lioudakis, G., Cuppens-Boulahia, N., Foley, S., Fitzgerald, W.M. (eds.) DPM 2013 and SETOP 2013. LNCS, vol. 8247, pp. 369–379. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)
Acknowledgments
This work was partly supported by the Spanish Government through projects CONSEQUENCE (TEC2010-20572-C02-02) and EMRISCO (TEC2013-47665-C4-1-R).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Puglisi, S., Rebollo-Monedero, D., Forné, J. (2016). You Never Surf Alone. Ubiquitous Tracking of Users’ Browsing Habits. In: Garcia-Alfaro, J., Navarro-Arribas, G., Aldini, A., Martinelli, F., Suri, N. (eds) Data Privacy Management, and Security Assurance. DPM QASA 2015 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9481. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29883-2_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29883-2_20
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-29882-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-29883-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)