Online privacy: analyzing the use of cookies in web pages

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the European regulation on the protection of individuals regarding the processing of their data. One point of the GPDR says that all websites must ask their EU users for consent to have their data processed. In this project several methods are developed t...

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Bibliographic Details
Author: Basart Dotras, Meritxell
Format: master thesis
Publication Date:2021
Country:España
Institution:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repository:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/360444
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/360444
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Cookies (Computer science)
Web sites
European Parliament. General Data Protection Regulation
cookies
privacy
GDPR
analysis
Pàgines web
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Sistemes d'informació
Description
Summary:General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the European regulation on the protection of individuals regarding the processing of their data. One point of the GPDR says that all websites must ask their EU users for consent to have their data processed. In this project several methods are developed to interact with web pages and analyze if websites are compliant with GDPR, analyzing the usage of cookies. The first objective is to ignore cookies. Using ORM we can identify the number of cookies that each domain sets by default. A large number of websites sets cookies by default. The second objective is the interaction with web pages to accept cookies. To do so, we use two different methods. The first one is a modified ORM version using Selenium and the second one also is a modified ORM version that uses Computer Vision. Both methods have shown that more than 50% of the websites visited do not ask for user consent. Finally, the third objective of the project is to find out what would happen if we blocked cookies and how this changed the operation of the web. We show that the cookies already inserted by default will remain and very few cookies are blocked. After we do all the methods and generate statistics, they are integrated into the ePrivacy Observatory, which is an observatory that provides the function of determining the level of tracking of each domain and different tracking methods.