Towards Understanding First-Party Cookie Tracking in the Field
- Third-party tracking is a common and broadly used technique on the Web. Different defense mechanisms have emerged to counter these practices (e.g. browser vendors that ban all third-party cookies). However, these countermeasures only target third-party trackers and ignore the first party because the narrative is that such monitoring is mostly used to improve the utilized service (e.g. analytical services). In this paper, we present a large-scale measurement study that analyzes tracking performed by the first party but utilized by a third party to circumvent standard tracking preventing techniques. We visit the top 15,000 websites to analyze first-party cookies used to track users and a technique called “DNS CNAME cloaking”, which can be used by a third party to place first-party cookies. Using this data, we show that 76% of sites effectively utilize such tracking techniques. In a long-running analysis, we show that the usage of such cookies increased by more than 50% over 2021.
Author: | Nurullah Demir, Daniel Theis, Tobias Urban, Norbert Pohlmann |
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URL: | https://norbert-pohlmann.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/435-Towards-Understanding-First-Party-Cookie-Tracking-in-the-Field-Prof-Norbert-Pohlmann.pdf |
Parent Title (English): | Sicherheit 2022 |
Document Type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Year of Completion: | 2022 |
Year of first Publication: | 2022 |
Publishing Institution: | Westfälische Hochschule Gelsenkirchen Bocholt Recklinghausen |
Release Date: | 2024/02/22 |
First Page: | 19 |
Last Page: | 34 |
Licence (German): | Es gilt das Urheberrechtsgesetz |