Tracking the Trackers: The AdChoices Icon
By Jonathan Mayer on August 18, 2011 at 12:57 am
(Jovanni Hernandez and Akshay Jagadeesh are the first authors of this study.) Read more about Tracking the Trackers: The AdChoices Icon
By Jonathan Mayer on August 18, 2011 at 12:57 am
(Jovanni Hernandez and Akshay Jagadeesh are the first authors of this study.) Read more about Tracking the Trackers: The AdChoices Icon
By Jennifer Granick on August 9, 2011 at 1:14 pm
This past weekend we saw another volley of rounds fired in the ongoing digital privacy wars. As with previous battles, this one started with the publication of an academic study and culminated in a class action lawsuit filed in the federal court in San Francisco. Read more about Like Zombies, Newfangled Cookies, Lawsuits Respawn
By Jonathan Mayer on August 9, 2011 at 12:21 am
Last week marked the twentieth anniversary of the public World Wide Web, and there is much to celebrate. The early web consisted of a few text pages linked together; the modern web supports audio, video, interactivity, complex storage, and even native applications. Both Microsoft and Google are now developing entire operating systems around web technologies.
Tools for measuring the web have not kept pace. Many studies still rely on HTTP header logging and static analysis of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Researchers who want to go beyond these simple tools are often forced to develop purpose-built software from scratch.
Today we're releasing FourthParty, an open-source platform for web measurement. FourthParty is built on Mozilla Firefox and the Add-on SDK, making it fast, modular, easy to use, multi-platform, and up-to-date with the latest web technologies. And FourthParty is already generating research results: it's the tool we've been using in our Tracking the Trackers studies (1, 2). To learn more and get started, visit fourthparty.info. Read more about FourthParty: A New Approach to Web Measurement
By Arvind Narayanan on July 28, 2011 at 12:38 pm
A 1993 New Yorker cartoon famously proclaimed, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." The Web is a very different place today; you now leave countless footprints online. You log into websites. You share stuff on social networks. You search for information about yourself and your friends, family, and colleagues. And yet, in the debate about online tracking, ad networks and tracking companies would have you believe we're still in the early 90s — they regularly advance, and get away with, “anonymization” or “we don’t collect Personally Identifiable Information” as an answer to privacy concerns.
Read more about There is no such thing as anonymous online tracking