Targeted and Troublesome: Tracking and Advertising on Children's Websites
Zahra Moti, Asuman Senol, Hamid Bostani, Frederik Zuiderveen, Borgesius, Veelasha Moonsamy, Arunesh Mathur, Gunes Acar

TL;DR
This study measures tracking and advertising practices on children's websites, revealing high prevalence of trackers and targeted ads, including inappropriate content, highlighting regulatory non-compliance and safety concerns.
Contribution
The paper introduces a multilingual classifier for identifying child-directed websites and develops an ML pipeline to detect inappropriate ads, providing new insights into online safety for children.
Findings
90% of child-directed websites embed trackers
27% contain targeted advertisements
Detection of inappropriate ads with explicit content
Abstract
On the modern web, trackers and advertisers frequently construct and monetize users' detailed behavioral profiles without consent. Despite various studies on web tracking mechanisms and advertisements, there has been no rigorous study focusing on websites targeted at children. To address this gap, we present a measurement of tracking and (targeted) advertising on websites directed at children. Motivated by lacking a comprehensive list of child-directed (i.e., targeted at children) websites, we first build a multilingual classifier based on web page titles and descriptions. Applying this classifier to over two million pages, we compile a list of two thousand child-directed websites. Crawling these sites from five vantage points, we measure the prevalence of trackers, fingerprinting scripts, and advertisements. Our crawler detects ads displayed on child-directed websites and determines if…
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Taxonomy
TopicsPrivacy, Security, and Data Protection · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology · Child Development and Digital Technology
