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Behavioural Tracking on the Internet: A Technical Perspective

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European Data Protection: In Good Health?

Abstract

The main goal of this chapter is to present a state-of the-art of behavioural tracking on the Internet and to highlight some of the resulting potential privacy threats. This chapter is structured as follows: First section introduces the concept of behavioural tracking. The following sections describe how tracking is performed by web sites, location-based services and social networks, respectively. Final section presents some of the existing tracking-prevention solutions. Finally, the author concludes the report and proposes some recommendations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Computational advertising is a new scientific sub-discipline whose main challenge is to find the best ad to present to a user engaged in a given context (Broder and Josifovski 2010).

  2. 2.

    Some sites included JavaScript code and third-party cookies from more than ten different tracking domains (Eckersley 2009).

  3. 3.

    The largest third-party Ad-network companies include Advertising.com, Tacoda, DoubleClick and Omniture. Most of these networks are owned by Google, Yahoo, AOL or Microsoft. Since Ad-networks are typically partnered with many publishers, they can track users across several publishers and build these users’ browsing profiles.

  4. 4.

    http://foursquare.com/.

  5. 5.

    http://gowalla.com/.

  6. 6.

    http://twitter.com/.

  7. 7.

    http://pleaserobme.com/.

  8. 8.

    http://www.google.com/latitude/.

  9. 9.

    http://maps.google.com/.

  10. 10.

    http://maps.yahoo.com/.

  11. 11.

    http://earth.google.com/.

  12. 12.

    http://facebook.com/.

  13. 13.

    http://www.myspace.com/.

  14. 14.

    http://www.orkut.com/.

  15. 15.

    http://www.linkedin.com/.

  16. 16.

    http://www.tribe.net/.

  17. 17.

    http://www.loopts.com/.

  18. 18.

    http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/.

  19. 19.

    The Disapora project, see http://www.joindiaspora.com/.

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Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the members of the INRIA Planete group for discussions and for proofreading this chapter. He would also thank Levente Buttyan, Imad Aad, Aurelien Francillon, Bala Krishnamurthy, Emiliano De Cristofaro and many others for providing comments on this chapter. Finally, the author would like to thank ENISA and more particularly Rodica Tirtea who was at the origin of this work and chapter. This chapter was published as a section of the Privacy, Accountability and Trust Challenges and Opportunities report, published by ENISA (2011).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. INRIA Rhone-Alpes, Grenoble, France

    Claude Castelluccia

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  1. Claude Castelluccia
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Correspondence to Claude Castelluccia .

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  1. Pleinlaan 2, Brussel, 1050, Belgium

    Serge Gutwirth

  2. , TILT, Tilburg University, Warandelaan 2, Tilburg, 5037 AB, Netherlands

    Ronald Leenes

  3. Center for Law, Science, Technology, and Society Studies (LSTS), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, Brussels, 1050, Belgium

    Paul De Hert

  4. Research Centre for Information, Technology & Law, University of Namur, Rempart de la Vierge 5, Namur, 5000, Belgium

    Yves Poullet

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Castelluccia, C. (2012). 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?. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2903-2_2

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