Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis
webtransparency.cs.princeton.edu
Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis
1–10 of 272 posts
Re: Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis
#2This is the kind of nonconsensual sureptitious user tracking that the EU privacy directive 2002/58/EC concerns itself with, not those redundant, stupid cookie consent overlays.
Re: Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis
#3After reading this it makes me want to disable JavaScript entirely, along with cookies, and go back to text browsing. I've been using Ghostery on my phone, it's been pretty good.
Re: Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis
#4Coauthor here. I lead the research team at Princeton working to uncover online tracking. Happy to answer questions.
The tool we built to do this research is open-source https://github.com/citp/OpenWPM/ We'd love to work with outside developers to improve it and do new things with it. We've also released the raw data from our study.
Re: Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis
#5All these things make the websites the new apps. Most probably we won't need to use many desktop applications a few years later.
Re: Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis
#6All of this makes me wonder how some of these interfaces should be more closely guarded by the user agent.
Perhaps instead of a site probing for capabilities, they should instead publish a list of what the site/page can leverage and what it absolutely needs to work. Maybe meta tags in the head or something like the robots.txt. Browsers can then pull the list and present it to the end user for white-listing.
You could have a series of tags similar to noscript to decorate broken portions of sites if you wanted to advertise missing features to users and, based on what features they chose to enable/disable for the site, the browser would selectively render them.
Re: Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis
#7NoScript is an all-or-nothing approach. Are there any JS-blockers that allow API-level blocks?
Re: Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis
#8What annoys me the most is how many useless cycles these trackers use to track me.
Re: Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis
#9All these things make the websites the new apps. Most probably we won't need to use many desktop applications a few years later.
That's the line Apple took with iOS shortly before it introduced the App store. Mozilla, Palm/HP, and even Microsoft with it's Win 8 Metro Apps tried to make websites the new apps. It has some short comings.
Web apps are definitely getting better, I haven't used an actual email client in 10 years, but they have a long way to go before they can replace dedicated clients entirely.
Re: Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis
#10All this so they can show me adds for stuff i already bought.