Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/05/state_of_online.html
Really interesting research: “Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis,” by Steven Englehardt and Arvind Narayanan:
Abstract: We present the largest and most detailed measurement of online tracking conducted to date, based on a crawl of the top 1 million websites. We make 15 types of measurements on each site, including stateful (cookie-based) and stateless (fingerprinting-based) tracking, the effect of browser privacy tools, and the exchange of tracking data between different sites (“cookie syncing”). Our findings include multiple sophisticated fingerprinting techniques never before measured in the wild.
This measurement is made possible by our web privacy measurement tool, OpenWPM, which uses an automated version of a full-fledged consumer browser. It supports parallelism for speed and scale, automatic recovery from failures of the underlying browser, and comprehensive browser instrumentation. OpenWPM is open-source1 and has already been used as the basis of seven published studies on web privacy and security.
Summary in this blog post.