"Studying a million websites is hard. To do it, Arvind Narayanan – who heads the Web Transparency and Accountability Project at Princeton University – built a tool called OpenWPM with graduate student Steven Englehardt. OpenWPM can visit and log in to websites automatically, taking more than a dozen measurements of each one. It took two weeks to crawl through the top million websites, as ranked by web traffic firm Alexa.
Tracking lets websites serve targeted ads, personalise what users see, or even price products differently. Audits like this one can make the process behind these behaviours more transparent, says Narayanan.
“You often don’t know how much tracking is going on, who’s doing the tracking, or what data they’re collecting about you and what that will be used for,” he says. “There needs to be external oversight, somebody holding companies’ feet to the fire.”"
- Date Published:06/01/2016
- Original Publication:New Scientist