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

Abstract

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

UdG researchers thank Red temática Go2Edge (Ref.: RED2018-102585-T) and Ajut PontUdG2020/23 for their partial funding. This work was also supported in part by the Spanish Government under Grant RTI2018-095094-B-C22 “CONSENT”, and is based in the first author’s Master’s thesis from the Cybersecurity and Privacy Master’s degree from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Elsevier