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Identifier 000414784
Title A longitudinal study of web trackers and their impact to the popularity of websites
Alternative Title Μια διαχρονική μελέτη των διαδικτυακών ιχνηλατών και τον αντίκτυπό τους στη δημοτικότητα των ιστότοπων
Author Δημητριάδης, Ευάγγελος Χ.
Author Μαρκάτος, Ευάγγελος
Reviewer Ιωαννίδης, Σωτήρης
Τσακαλίδης, Παναγιώτης
Abstract Third party content in the form of web trackers has become a cornerstone of the internet, over the past years. The privacy risks that arise from the excessive use of tracking mechanisms has drawn the attention of the community. In this paper we provide a large-scale measurement over the past 7 years, observing the incremental rise of trackers on Alexa’s top 50K websites. We examine the growth and popularity of third party content that aims to identify users on the web. Furthermore, we perform deeper analysis on websites that contain an overly large number of trackers. Our dataset of the past seven years has been collected from entries of archive.org. Using those datapoints, we mainly focus on the connection between the number of trackers and the website’s Alexa Rank. Our results indicate a clear correlation between the number of trackers and a website’s Alexa Rank. We verify the increased use of third party tracking on the web, taking advantage of well-known blacklists to filter out generic third party content. Moreover, we observe the rise of the dominant trackers alongside the new ones that try to emerge yearly, in the fast moving internet economy. We believe that this study clears the field which regards the quantification of this phenomenon, provides results and measurements of the current state of online privacy, as well as insights for its future.
Language English
Subject Alexa Rank
Web trackers
Διαδίκτυο
Ιχνηλάτες
Issue date 2018-03-23
Collection   School/Department--School of Sciences and Engineering--Department of Computer Science--Post-graduate theses
  Type of Work--Post-graduate theses
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