Web Tracking: Mechanisms, Implications, and Defenses
Tomasz Bujlow, Valent\'in Carela-Espa\~nol, Josep Sol\'e-Pareta, Pere, Barlet-Ros

TL;DR
This paper surveys web tracking methods, their implications, and defenses, highlighting privacy concerns and presenting tools and future threats related to user tracking on the web.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive overview of tracking techniques, their purposes, and defenses, with a focus on recent methods like fingerprinting and cache-based tracking.
Findings
Tracking methods are diverse, including fingerprinting and cache analysis.
Users can be linked to personal identities through tracking.
Existing defenses include tools that detect and visualize tracking activities.
Abstract
This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed articles and web resources are from years 2012-2014. Privacy seems to be the Achilles' heel of today's web. Web services make continuous efforts to obtain as much information as they can about the things we search, the sites we visit, the people with who we contact, and the products we buy. Tracking is usually performed for commercial purposes. We present 5 main groups of methods used for user tracking, which are based on sessions, client storage, client cache, fingerprinting, or yet other approaches. A special focus is placed on mechanisms that use web caches, operational caches, and fingerprinting, as they are usually very rich in terms of using various creative…
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Taxonomy
TopicsPrivacy, Security, and Data Protection · Advanced Malware Detection Techniques · Spam and Phishing Detection
