research-article

Privacy diffusion on the web: a longitudinal perspective

Authors:

Balachander Krishnamurthy and

Craig WillsAuthors Info & Claims

WWW '09: Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web

April 2009

Pages 541 - 550

https://doi.org/10.1145/1526709.1526782

Published: 20 April 2009 Publication History

Abstract

For the last few years we have been studying the diffusion of private information for users as they visit various Web sites triggering data gathering aggregation by third parties. This paper reports on our longitudinal study consisting of multiple snapshots of our examination of such diffusion over four years. We examine the various technical ways by which third-party aggregators acquire data and the depth of user-related information acquired. We study techniques for protecting privacy diffusion as well as limitations of such techniques. We introduce the concept of secondary privacy damage. Our results show increasing aggregation of user-related data by a steadily decreasing number of entities. A handful of companies are able to track users' movement across almost all of the popular Web sites. Virtually all the protection techniques have significant limitations highlighting the seriousness of the problem and the need for alternate solutions.

References

[1]

Adblock plus: Save your time and traffic. http://adblockplus.org/

[2]

C. Albanesius. Microsoft tips {IE8} privacy features, August 26 2008. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2328900,00.asp

[3]

Alexa: Most popular web sites. http://www.alexa.com/

[4]

Cuil -- your privacy. http://www.cuil.com/privacy/

[5]

W. Davis. Polish on google's new chrome tarnished by privacy questions, September 2, 2008. http://www.mediapost.com/publications/index.cfm?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid$

[6]

S. DeDeo. Pagestats, May 2006. http://www.cs.wpi.edu/cew/pagestats/

[7]

European union directive 95/46/{EC}. http://www.cdt.org/privacy/eudirective/EU_Directive.html, 1995.

[8]

A. Greenberg. Going 'incongnito' can you really web browse on the down low?, September 5, 2008. http://www.newsweek.com/id/157293?tid=relatedcl

[9]

I'm A Super.Com. Flash cookies: The silent privacy killer, October 9 2008. http://www.imasuper.com/66/technology/flash-cookies-the-silent-privacy-killer/

[10]

C. Jackson, A. Bortz, D. Boneh, and J. C. Mitchell. Protecting browser state from web privacy attacks. In Proceedings of the International World Wide Web Conference, Edinburgh, Scotland, May 2006.

Digital Library

[11]

B. Krishnamurthy, D. Malandrino, and C. E. Wills. Measuring privacy loss and the impact of privacy protection in web browsing. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, pages 52--63, Pittsburgh, PA USA, July 2007.

Digital Library

[12]

B. Krishnamurthy and C. Wills. Cat and mouse: Content delivery tradeoffs in web access. In Proceedings of the International World Wide Web Conference, Edinburgh, Scotland, May 2006.

Digital Library

[13]

B. Krishnamurthy and C. E. Wills. Generating a privacy footprint on the {Internet}. In Proceedings of IMC, October 2006.

Digital Library

[14]

B. Krishnamurthy and C. E. Wills. Characterizing privacy in online social networks. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Online Social Networks, pages 37--42, Seattle, WA USA, August 2008. ACM.

Digital Library

[15]

Michael Afergan and Thomson Leighton and Timothy Johnson and Brian Mancuso and Ken Iwamoto. Method of data collection among participating content providers in a distributed network, 2008. United States Patent Application 20080092058. http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2008/0092058.html

[16]

Mike On Ads. How do behavioral networks work?, February 28 2007. http://www.mikeonads.com/2007/02/28/how-do-behavioral-networks-work/

[17]

Noscript. https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/722/

[18]

S. Olsen and T. Krazit. Dell embraces google, May 25, 2006. http://news.cnet.com/Dell-embraces-Google/2100-1032_3-6077051.html

[19]

Pests clasified in the category tracking cookie. http://www.pestpatrol.com/zks/pestinfo/tracking_cookie.asp

[20]

Privacy on the web: Is it a losing battle?, June 25, 2008. Published in Knowledge@Wharton. http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1999

[21]

P. Whoriskey. Candidates' web sites get to know the voters presidential campaigns tailor, target ads based on visitors' online habits, August 30 2008. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/29/AR2008082903178

[22]

Consumer tips: How to opt-out of cookies that track you. http://www.worldprivacyforum.org/cookieoptout.html

Cited By

Gamidullaeva LFinogeev AKataev MBulysheva L(2023)A Design Concept for a Tourism Recommender System for Regional DevelopmentAlgorithms10.3390/a1601005816:1(58)Online publication date: 16-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.3390/a16010058
DAO HVO QPHAM TFUKUDA K(2023)I Never Trust My University for This! Investigating Student PII Leakage at Vietnamese UniversitiesIEICE Transactions on Information and Systems10.1587/transinf.2023EDP7078E106.D:12(2048-2056)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1587/transinf.2023EDP7078
Zafar ADas AShehab MFernandez MLi N(2023)Comparative Privacy Analysis of Mobile BrowsersProceedings of the Thirteenth ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy10.1145/3577923.3583638(3-14)Online publication date: 24-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3577923.3583638
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Privacy diffusion on the web: a longitudinal perspective
1. Networks
  1. Network protocols
    1. Application layer protocols

Recommendations

Sensible Privacy: How We Can Protect Domestic Violence Survivors Without Facilitating Misuse
WPES '14: Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society

Privacy is a concept with real life ties and implications. Privacy infringement has the potential to lead to serious consequences for the stakeholders involved, hence researchers and organisations have developed various privacy enhancing techniques and ...
Read More
Measuring privacy loss and the impact of privacy protection in web browsing
SOUPS '07: Proceedings of the 3rd symposium on Usable privacy and security

Various bits of information about users accessing Web sites. some of which are private, have been gathered since the inception of the Web. Increasingly the gathering, aggregation, and processing has been outsourced to third parties. The goal of this ...
Read More
On Being an Expert: Habitus as a Lens for Understanding Privacy Expertise
CSCW

How do privacy experts and lay persons differ? We investigate this question using data about the use of privacy-enhancing technologies and strategies from 128 surveys and 17 follow-up interviews with two populations: privacy experts (i.e., privacy ...
Read More

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

WWW '09: Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web

April 2009

1280 pages

ISBN:9781605584874

DOI:10.1145/1526709

General Chairs:
Juan Quemada
DIT-UPM
,
Gonzalo León
DIT-UPM
,
Program Chairs:
Yoelle Maarek
Google Inc., Israel
,
Wolfgang Nejdl
L3S and Hannover University

Copyright © 2009 IW3C2 org.

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 20 April 2009

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

WWW '09

Sponsor:

WWW '09: The 18th International World Wide Web Conference

April 20 - 24, 2009

Madrid, Spain

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

174
Total Citations
View Citations
1,454
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)81
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)6

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Gamidullaeva LFinogeev AKataev MBulysheva L(2023)A Design Concept for a Tourism Recommender System for Regional DevelopmentAlgorithms10.3390/a1601005816:1(58)Online publication date: 16-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.3390/a16010058
DAO HVO QPHAM TFUKUDA K(2023)I Never Trust My University for This! Investigating Student PII Leakage at Vietnamese UniversitiesIEICE Transactions on Information and Systems10.1587/transinf.2023EDP7078E106.D:12(2048-2056)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1587/transinf.2023EDP7078
Zafar ADas AShehab MFernandez MLi N(2023)Comparative Privacy Analysis of Mobile BrowsersProceedings of the Thirteenth ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy10.1145/3577923.3583638(3-14)Online publication date: 24-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3577923.3583638
Lam NClavel M(2023)Web Browsers’ Support for Managing Cookies. An Experiment ReportFuture Data and Security Engineering. Big Data, Security and Privacy, Smart City and Industry 4.0 Applications10.1007/978-981-99-8296-7_10(135-152)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8296-7_10
Su ZHelles RAl-Laith AVeilahti ASaxena ASimonsen J(2023)Privacy Lost in Online Education: Analysis of Web Tracking EvolutionAdvanced Data Mining and Applications10.1007/978-3-031-46664-9_30(440-455)Online publication date: 5-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46664-9_30
Kashaf ADou JBelova MApostolaki MAgarwal YSekar V(2023)A First Look at Third-Party Service Dependencies of Web Services in AfricaPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-031-28486-1_25(595-622)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-28486-1_25
Huo MBland MLevchenko KHong YWang L(2022)All Eyes On MeProceedings of the 21st Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society10.1145/3559613.3563190(197-211)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3559613.3563190
Sprecher SKerschbaumer CKirda E(2022)SoK: All or Nothing - A Postmortem of Solutions to the Third-Party Script Inclusion Permission Model and a Path Forward2022 IEEE 7th European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P)10.1109/EuroSP53844.2022.00021(206-222)Online publication date: Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/EuroSP53844.2022.00021
Hu X(2022)PRIVIS: Tracing and Visualising the Web Privacy Ecosystem across the World2022 IEEE 5th International Conference on Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (BDAI)10.1109/BDAI56143.2022.9862682(142-147)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/BDAI56143.2022.9862682
Massimo DRicci F(2022)Building effective recommender systems for touristsAI Magazine10.1002/aaai.1205743:2(209-224)Online publication date: 16-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/aaai.12057
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents