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Big friend is watching you: analyzing online social networks tracking capabilities

Published:17 August 2012Publication History

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we examine web user tracking capabilities of the three major global Online Social Networks (OSNs). We study 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 from the audience. We also evaluate the tracking capabilities in practice and demonstrate by analyzing a real traffic traces that OSNs can reconstruct a significant portion of users web profile and browsing history. We finally provide insights into the relation between the browsing history characteristics and the OSN tracking potential, highlighting the high risk properties.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        WOSN '12: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM workshop on Workshop on online social networks
        August 2012
        80 pages
        ISBN:9781450314800
        DOI:10.1145/2342549

        Copyright © 2012 ACM

        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 17 August 2012

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        Acceptance Rates

        WOSN '12 Paper Acceptance Rate12of36submissions,33%Overall Acceptance Rate12of36submissions,33%

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