Abstract
Web bugs are Web-based digital tracking objects enabling third parties to monitor access to the content, in which they are embedded. Web bugs are commonly used by advertisers to monitor web users. The negative impact of web bugs on the privacy of users is known for over a decade. In recent years, Web 2.0 technologies have introduced social aspects into the online media, enhancing the ability of ordinary users to act as the content providers. However, this has also allowed end-users to place web bugs online. This has not only increased the number of potential initiators of monitoring of web surfing behaviour, but also potentially introduced new privacy threats. This paper presents a study on end-user induced web bugs. Our experimental results indicate that, in the light of Web 2.0 technologies, the well-known concept of web bugs leads to new privacy-related problems.
Part of the research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement No. 216483 for the project PrimeLife.
Chapter PDF
References
Alsaid, A., Martin, D.: Detecting web bugs with bugnosis: Privacy advocacy through education. In: Dingledine, R., Syverson, P.F. (eds.) PET 2002. LNCS, vol. 2482, pp. 13–26. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Martin, D., Wu, H., Alsaid, A.: Hidden Surveillance by Web Sites: Web Bugs in Contemporary Use. Commun. ACM 46(12), 258–264 (2003)
Nichols, S.: Big Brother is Watching: An Update on Web Bugs. Tech. rep., SANS Institute (2001)
Office of Inspector General: Use of internet cookies and web bugs on commerce web sites raises privacy and security concerns. Tech. rep., U.S. Department of Commerce (2001)
Smith, R.M.: Synchronizing Cookies with Email addresses (1999), http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/workshops/profiling/comments/rsmith.htm (accessed January 2011)
Smith, R.M.: The Web Bug FAQ (1999), http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Marketing/web_bug.html (accessed January 2011)
Primelife privacy dashboard, http://www.primelife.eu/results/opensource/76-dashboard (accessed January 2011)
Ghostery, http://www.ghostery.com/ (accessed January 2011)
Bugnosis, http://www.bugnosis.org/ (accessed June 2010)
Web bug detector, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9202/ (last update April 2009) (accessed January 2011)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Dobias, J. (2011). Privacy Effects of Web Bugs Amplified by Web 2.0. In: Fischer-Hübner, S., Duquenoy, P., Hansen, M., Leenes, R., Zhang, G. (eds) Privacy and Identity Management for Life. Privacy and Identity 2010. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 352. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20769-3_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20769-3_20
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-20768-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-20769-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)