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We perform a large-scale analysis of third-party trackers on the World Wide Web from more than 3.5 billion web pages of the CommonCrawl 2012 corpus. We extract a dataset containing more than 140 million third-party embeddings in over 41 million domains. To the best of our knowledge, this constitutes the largest web tracking dataset collected so far, and exceeds related studies by more than an order of magnitude in the number of domains and web pages analyzed. We perform a large-scale study of online tracking, on three levels: (1) On a global level, we give a precise figure for the extent of tracking, give insights into the structure of the `online tracking sphere' and analyse which trackers are used by how many websites. (2) On a country-specific level, we analyse which trackers are used by websites in different countries, and identify the countries in which websites choose significantly different trackers than in the rest of the world. (3) We answer the question whether the content of websites influences the choice of trackers they use, leveraging more than 90 thousand categorized domains. In particular, we analyse whether highly privacy-critical websites make different choices of

Author

Schelter, Sebastian; Kunegis, Jérôme

Published

2016

Language

EN