WhoTracks.Me: Monitoring the online tracking landscape at scale
Arjaldo Karaj, Sam Macbeth, Rémi Berson, Josep M. Pujol
(Submitted on 24 Apr 2018)
We present the largest and longest measurement of online tracking to date based on real users. The data, which is made publicly available, is generated from more than 780 million page loads over the course of the last 10 months. Previous attempts to measure the tracking ecosystem, are done via measurement platforms that do not interact with websites the same way a user does. We instrument a crowd-sourced measurement of third-parties across the web via users who consent to data collection via a browser extension. The collection is done with privacy-by-design in mind, and introduces no privacy side effects. This approach overcomes limitations of previous work by collecting real web usage across multiple countries, ISP and browser configurations, and on difficult to crawl pages, such as those behind logins, giving a more accurate portrayal of the online-tracking ecosystem.
The data, which we plan to continue contributing to and maintain in the future, and WhoTracks.Me website - the living representation of the data, are available for researchers, regulators, journalists, web developers and users to detect tracking behaviours, analyse the tracking landscape, develop efficient tools, devise policies and raise awareness of the negative externalities tracking introduces. We believe this work provides the transparency needed to shine a light on a very opaque industry.
