Web Side Story: A Privacy Odyssey through Tracking and Fingerprinting
summary
A measurement platform uses fine‑grain tainting to build a tracking tree and per‑request tracking flows that label initiators, intermediaries and executors; analysis of ~250k users and the top 1M sites finds one tracker alone sees ~64% of browsing history (present on ~40% of top sites), runners up see 30% and 23%, and inter‑tracker sharing boosts coverage up to ~50% more. New evasion patterns like ghosted tracking hide third‑party IDs as first‑party cookies, video players and bot detectors exfiltrate cookies, and advanced canvas/WebGL fingerprinting appears increasingly in phishing kits; recommended defenses are privacy extensions, transparency and granular consent.
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chapters (23)
- 0:00Web privacy odyssey intro
- 1:03Modern web tracking complexity
- 2:49Traditional tracking detection limits
- 4:12Tracking patterns on millions of sites
- 5:37Tracking trees and flows
- 7:26Tracking roles: initiators, intermediaries, executors
- 9:11Ghosted tracking and new patterns
- 11:00Tracking roles: creators, senders, receivers
- 13:09Tracking in gaming and video sites
- 14:14Tracking in video chat and bot detection
- 16:22Tracking in news websites and sponsor advertisements
- 18:06Tracking prevalence across the web
- 21:41Tracking vs fingerprinting and threats
- 22:44Fingerprint theft implications
- 25:35Basic and advanced fingerprinting
- 28:02Malicious sites and fingerprinting
- 29:31Targets of fingerprint theft
- 30:36Privacy protection steps
- 32:42Privacy transparency and choices
- 34:25Q&A
- 37:55Policy and regulatory challenges
- 41:06Ghosted and server-side tracking deep dive
- 45:40Future of cookies and tracking alternatives
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