Tracker Installations Are Not Created Equal: Understanding Tracker Configuration of Form Data Collection

TL;DR

This study analyzes how Google and Meta trackers are configured on websites to collect form data, revealing prevalent practices, inaccuracies in privacy claims, and potential policy violations affecting user privacy.

Contribution

It provides a large-scale measurement of tracker configurations, compares Google and Meta practices, and highlights the influence of documentation and interfaces on privacy-preserving configurations.

Findings

Google trackers are more prevalent than Meta trackers.

Meta trackers are configured to collect form data more frequently.

Some trackers on sensitive sites likely violate policies.

Abstract

Targeted advertising is fueled by the comprehensive tracking of users' online activity. As a result, advertising companies, such as Google and Meta, encourage website administrators to not only install tracking scripts on their websites but configure them to automatically collect users' Personally Identifying Information (PII). In this study, we aim to characterize how Google and Meta's trackers can be configured to collect PII data from web forms. We first perform a qualitative analysis of how third parties present form data collection to website administrators in the documentation and user interface. We then perform a measurement study of 40,150 websites to quantify the prevalence and configuration of Google and Meta trackers. Our results reveal that both Meta and Google encourage the use of form data collection and include inaccurate statements about hashing PII as a privacy-preserving method. Additionally, we find that Meta includes configuring form data collection as part of the basic setup flow. Our large-scale measurement study reveals that while Google trackers are more prevalent than Meta trackers (72.6% vs. 28.2% of websites), Meta trackers are configured to collect form data more frequently (11.6% vs. 62.3%). Finally, we identify sensitive finance and health websites that have installed trackers that are likely configured to collect form data PII in violation of Meta and Google policies. Our study highlights how tracker documentation and interfaces can potentially play a role in users' privacy through the configuration choices made by the website administrators who install trackers.