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Updated abstract to match v0.3.1
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joelpurra committed Sep 30, 2014
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While browsing the web users are both actively and passively being tracked by multiple companies, for the purpose of building a persona for targeted advertising. Sometimes the data collection is visible, as in social network sites and questionnaires, but it's most common in the form of different kinds of external resources which may or may not serve a purpose other than keeping track of your every click. Tracking code is installed on web pages that have adverts as well as those that do not - the spread and reach of tracking across web pages and domains of different kinds increases the quality of the user data collected and inferred, making it more valuable for advertising purposes. With the extent of the use of trackers and other external resources largely unknown and ever evolving, what is already known raises privacy concerns - data considered personal leak without the user's knowledge or explicit permission and end up in privately owned databases for further distribution. Data collection is the new wild west, and you are the new cattle.
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To show the overlap between different sites, front pages of Swedish top sites were downloaded and their resources counted and grouped. In this thesis I show the use of resources internal versus external to the entry domain, which the most common confirmed trackers are, what spread they have and how much the average Swedish internet user can expect to be tracked by visiting some of the most import and popular sites in Sweden.
Front pages of approximately 150.000 random .se, .dk, .com, .net domains and Swedish, Danish and Alexa's top domains were visited and their resources, including those dynamically loaded, recorded. Resources were grouped by mime type, URL protocol, domain, if it matches the domain the request originated from and compared to lists of known trackers and organizations. In this thesis I show the use of resources internal versus external to the entry domain, which the most common confirmed trackers are, what spread they have and how much the average internet user can expect to be tracked by visiting some of the most important and popular sites in Sweden, Denmark and worldwide.
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<a href="http://joelpurra.com/projects/masters-thesis/files/documents/latest/joel-purra_masters-thesis_report.pdf">Thesis draft</a>
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