Under the Spotlight: Web Tracking in Indian Partisan News Websites

TL;DR

This study analyzes web tracking practices on Indian partisan news websites, revealing significant differences in tracking intensity and methods across political orientations, with implications for user privacy.

Contribution

First comprehensive analysis of web tracking and partisanship on Indian news sites, comparing tracking metrics across political alignments.

Findings

Left and Centre sites serve more cookies than Right sites.

Left sites have more synchronized user IDs via cookie syncing.

Centre sites use more invisible pixel tracking than Right and Left.

Abstract

India is experiencing intense political partisanship and sectarian divisions. The paper performs, to the best of our knowledge, the first comprehensive analysis on the Indian online news media with respect to tracking and partisanship. We build a dataset of 103 online, mostly mainstream news websites. With the help of two experts, alongside data from the Media Ownership Monitor of the Reporters without Borders, we label these websites according to their partisanship (Left, Right, or Centre). We study and compare user tracking on these sites with different metrics: numbers of cookies, cookie synchronizations, device fingerprinting, and invisible pixel-based tracking. We find that Left and Centre websites serve more cookies than Right-leaning websites. However, through cookie synchronization, more user IDs are synchronized in Left websites than Right or Centre. Canvas fingerprinting is used similarly by Left and Right, and less by Centre. Invisible pixel-based tracking is 50% more intense in Centre-leaning websites than Right, and 25% more than Left. Desktop versions of news websites deliver more cookies than their mobile counterparts. A handful of third-parties are tracking users in most websites in this study. This paper, by demonstrating intense web tracking, has implications for research on overall privacy of users visiting partisan news websites in India.