Web-tracking compliance: websites’ level of confidence in the use of information-gathering technologies

With the emergence of new technologies and the generalized use of social media, corporations have an invested economic interest in employing web-tracking techniques, but there is also the issue of protecting users’ privacy. In this field of research, only few articles introduce methods to evaluate w...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Martínez Álvarez, David, Calle Ortega, Eusebi, Jové, Albert, Pérez-Solà, Cristina
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2022
Country:España
Institution:Varias* (Consorci de Biblioteques Universitáries de Catalunya, Centre de Serveis Científics i Acadèmics de Catalunya)
Repository:Recercat. Dipósit de la Recerca de Catalunya
OAI Identifier:oai:recercat.cat:10256/21698
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10256/21698
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Internet -- Mesures de seguretat
Internet -- Security measures
Protecció de dades
Data protection
Description
Summary:With the emergence of new technologies and the generalized use of social media, corporations have an invested economic interest in employing web-tracking techniques, but there is also the issue of protecting users’ privacy. In this field of research, only few articles introduce methods to evaluate website compliance in the use of current web-tracking techniques. Moreover, evaluating the level of compliance requires, in the majority of cases, manually implementing an extensive data analysis. In this paper, we present four new algorithms (CIA, CDA, BDA, and SCA) and a novel measure (WLoC) to evaluate user tracking compliance in websites and the level of confidence in the use of information-gathering technologies, by employing the recently published Website Evidence Collector (WEC) software from the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS). The paper also showcases a case study of the top 500 websites most visited by Alexa in Spain to evaluate the performance of the presented algorithms and metrics. Results reveal a novel procedure for obtaining categorized websites’ compliance and confidence levels of a set of websites under the current European legislation, thus updating and enhancing some of the previous research work