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Update report, abstract to v0.4.3
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joelpurra committed Feb 6, 2015
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Abstract
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<p>
When you are browsing websites, third-party resources track your online habits; such tracking can be considered an invasion of privacy. It was previously unknown how many third-party resources, trackers and tracker companies are present on an average website. While downloading over 150 000 globally popular as well as random .com/.net/.se/.dk websites, in-browser HTTP/HTTPS traffic was recorded. Data shows that known third-party resources including known trackers are present on over 70% of sites, that tracking is as prevalent on secure as insecure sites and that third-party hosted <em>content</em> such as video, scripts and fonts make up a large portion of the known trackers seen on a typical website.
When you are browsing websites, third-party resources record your online habits; such <em>tracking</em> can be considered an invasion of privacy. It was previously unknown how many third-party resources, trackers and tracker companies are present in the different classes of websites chosen: globally popular websites, random samples of .se/.dk/.com/.net domains and curated lists of websites of public interest in Sweden. The in-browser HTTP/HTTPS traffic was recorded while downloading over 150,000 websites, allowing comparison of HTTPS adaption and third-party tracking within and across the different classes of websites.
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The data shows that known third-party resources including known trackers are present on <em>over 90%</em> of most classes, that third-party hosted <em>content</em> such as video, scripts and fonts make up a large portion of the known trackers seen on a typical website and that tracking is just as prevalent on <em>secure</em> as insecure sites.
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Observations include that Google is the most widespread tracker organization <em>by far</em>, that content is being served by known trackers may suggest that trackers are moving to providing services to the end user to <em>avoid being blocked</em> by privacy tools and ad blockers, and that the small difference in tracking between using HTTP and HTTPS connections may suggest that users are given a <em>false sense of privacy</em> when using HTTPS.
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<a href="http://joelpurra.com/projects/masters-thesis/files/documents/latest/joel-purra_masters-thesis_report.pdf">Thesis draft</a> (pdf)
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