You never surf alone. Ubiquitous tracking of users' browsing habits

TL;DR

This paper investigates how modern web tracking by advertising networks collects and analyzes users' browsing habits, revealing the extent and speed of user profiling in today's internet environment.

Contribution

It provides a measurement-based analysis of user tracking and profiling by advertising networks, highlighting the rapidity and extent of data collection.

Findings

Advertising networks quickly build detailed user profiles.

Users' online footprints are extensively tracked across websites.

Profiling occurs within short browsing sessions.

Abstract

In the early age of the internet users enjoyed a large level of anonymity. At the time web pages were just hypertext documents; almost no personalisation of the user experience was o ered. The Web today has evolved as a world wide distributed system following specific architectural paradigms. On the web now, an enormous quantity of user generated data is shared and consumed by a network of applications and services, reasoning upon users expressed preferences and their social and physical connections. Advertising networks follow users' browsing habits while they surf the web, continuously collecting their traces and surfing patterns. We analyse how users tracking happens on the web by measuring their online footprint and estimating how quickly advertising networks are able to pro le users by their browsing habits.