Section: New Results

Behavioural advertisement

Participants : Mohamed Ali Kaafar, Abdelberi Chaabane.

Online Social Networks Tracking. I examined web user tracking capabilities of the three major global OSNs. I studied the mechanisms which enable these services to persistently and accurately follow users web activity, and evaluate to which extent this phenomena is spread across the web. Through a study of the top 10K websites, our findings indicate that OSN tracking is diffused among almost all website categories, independently from the content and the audience. I also evaluated the tracking capabilities in practice and demonstrated – by analysing a real traffic traces – that OSNs can reconstruct a significant portion of users web profile and browsing history. I finally provided insights into the relation between the browsing history characteristics and the OSN tracking potential, highlighting the high risk properties. This work shows that web tracking in combination with personal information from social networks represents a serious privacy violation that shifts the tracking from a virtual tracking (i.e. the user is virtual) to a real “physical” tracking (i.e. based on user personal information).