901 research outputs found
I Refuse if You Let Me: Studying User Behavior with Privacy Banners at Scale
Privacy Banners are a common experience while surfing the Web. Mandated by privacy regulations, they are the way for users to express their consent to the usage of cookies and data collection. They take various forms, carry different wordings and offer different interaction mechanisms. While several works have qualitatively evaluated the effectiveness of privacy
banners, it is still unclear how users take advantage of the options offered and if and how the design of the banner could influence their choice.
This work presents a large-scale analysis of how the Privacy Banner options impact on usersâ interaction with it. We use data from a global Consent Management Platform serving more than 400 websites with visitors from all countries. With this, we observe more than 4 M interactions collected over three months. We find that only 1-4% of visitors opt out of cookies when more than one click is required. Conversely, when offered a Reject All button to deny consent with a single click, the percentage of users who deny consent increases to about 21%. We further investigate other properties, such as the visitorâs country, device type, banner position, etc. While the results confirm some common beliefs, to the best of our knowledge, his
is the first work to accurately quantify how people interact with Privacy Banners and observe the effect of offering a single-click refusal option. We believe our work improves the understanding of user behaviour and perception of privacy, as well as the implications and effectiveness of privacy regulations
Privacy Preference Signals: Past, Present and Future
Privacy preference signals are digital representations of how users want
their personal data to be processed. Such signals must be adopted by both the
sender (users) and intended recipients (data processors). Adoption represents a
coordination problem that remains unsolved despite efforts dating back to the
1990s. Browsers implemented standards like the Platform for Privacy Preferences
(P3P) and Do Not Track (DNT), but vendors profiting from personal data faced
few incentives to receive and respect the expressed wishes of data subjects. In
the wake of recent privacy laws, a coalition of AdTech firms published the
Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF), which defines an opt-in consent
signal. This paper integrates post-GDPR developments into the wider history of
privacy preference signals. Our main contribution is a high-frequency
longitudinal study describing how TCF signal gained dominance as of February
2021. We explore which factors correlate with adoption at the website level.
Both the number of third parties on a website and the presence of Google Ads
are associated with higher adoption of TCF. Further, we show that vendors acted
as early adopters of TCF 2.0 and provide two case-studies describing how
Consent Management Providers shifted existing customers to TCF 2.0. We sketch
ways forward for a pro-privacy signal
Beyond the Front Page: Measuring Third Party Dynamics in the Field
In the modern Web, service providers often rely heavily on third parties to
run their services. For example, they make use of ad networks to finance their
services, externally hosted libraries to develop features quickly, and
analytics providers to gain insights into visitor behavior.
For security and privacy, website owners need to be aware of the content they
provide their users. However, in reality, they often do not know which third
parties are embedded, for example, when these third parties request additional
content as it is common in real-time ad auctions.
In this paper, we present a large-scale measurement study to analyze the
magnitude of these new challenges. To better reflect the connectedness of third
parties, we measured their relations in a model we call third party trees,
which reflects an approximation of the loading dependencies of all third
parties embedded into a given website. Using this concept, we show that
including a single third party can lead to subsequent requests from up to eight
additional services. Furthermore, our findings indicate that the third parties
embedded on a page load are not always deterministic, as 50% of the branches in
the third party trees change between repeated visits. In addition, we found
that 93% of the analyzed websites embedded third parties that are located in
regions that might not be in line with the current legal framework. Our study
also replicates previous work that mostly focused on landing pages of websites.
We show that this method is only able to measure a lower bound as subsites show
a significant increase of privacy-invasive techniques. For example, our results
show an increase of used cookies by about 36% when crawling websites more
deeply
Crumbled Cookie Exploring E-commerce Websites Cookie Policies with Data Protection Regulations
Despite stringent data protection regulations such as the General Data
Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and
other country-specific regulations, many websites continue to use cookies to
track user activities. Recent studies have revealed several data protection
violations, resulting in significant penalties, especially for multinational
corporations. Motivated by the question of why these data protection violations
continue to occur despite strong data protection regulations, we examined 360
popular e-commerce websites in multiple countries to analyze whether they
comply with regulations to protect user privacy from a cookie perspective
We Value Your Privacy ... Now Take Some Cookies: Measuring the GDPR's Impact on Web Privacy
The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into
effect on May 25, 2018. Its privacy regulations apply to any service and
company collecting or processing personal data in Europe. Many companies had to
adjust their data handling processes, consent forms, and privacy policies to
comply with the GDPR's transparency requirements. We monitored this rare event
by analyzing the GDPR's impact on popular websites in all 28 member states of
the European Union. For each country, we periodically examined its 500 most
popular websites - 6,579 in total - for the presence of and updates to their
privacy policy. While many websites already had privacy policies, we find that
in some countries up to 15.7 % of websites added new privacy policies by May
25, 2018, resulting in 84.5 % of websites having privacy policies. 72.6 % of
websites with existing privacy policies updated them close to the date. Most
visibly, 62.1 % of websites in Europe now display cookie consent notices, 16 %
more than in January 2018. These notices inform users about a site's cookie use
and user tracking practices. We categorized all observed cookie consent notices
and evaluated 16 common implementations with respect to their technical
realization of cookie consent. Our analysis shows that core web security
mechanisms such as the same-origin policy pose problems for the implementation
of consent according to GDPR rules, and opting out of third-party cookies
requires the third party to cooperate. Overall, we conclude that the GDPR is
making the web more transparent, but there is still a lack of both functional
and usable mechanisms for users to consent to or deny processing of their
personal data on the Internet.Comment: Published at NDSS 201
Are cookie banners indeed compliant with the law? Deciphering EU legal requirements on consent and technical means to verify compliance of cookie banners
In this work, we analyze the legal requirements on how cookie banners are
supposed to be implemented to be fully compliant with the e-Privacy Directive
and the General Data Protection Regulation. Our contribution resides in the
definition of seventeen operational and fine-grained requirements on cookie
banner design that are legally compliant, and moreover, we define whether and
when the verification of compliance of each requirement is technically
feasible. The definition of requirements emerges from a joint interdisciplinary
analysis composed of lawyers and computer scientists in the domain of web
tracking technologies. As such, while some requirements are provided by
explicitly codified legal sources, others result from the domain-expertise of
computer scientists. In our work, we match each requirement against existing
cookie banners design of websites. For each requirement, we exemplify with
compliant and non-compliant cookie banners. As an outcome of a technical
assessment, we verify per requirement if technical (with computer science
tools) or manual (with any human operator) verification is needed to assess
compliance of consent and we also show which requirements are impossible to
verify with certainty in the current architecture of the Web. For example, we
explain how the requirement for revocable consent could be implemented in
practice: when consent is revoked, the publisher should delete the consent
cookie and communicate the withdrawal to all third parties who have previously
received consent. With this approach we aim to support practically-minded
parties (compliance officers, regulators, researchers, and computer scientists)
to assess compliance and detect violations in cookie banner design and
implementation, specially under the current revision of the European Union
e-Privacy framework.Comment: 75 page
The Internet with Privacy Policies: Measuring The Web Upon Consent
To protect user privacy, legislators have regulated the use of tracking technologies, mandating the acquisition of users' consent before collecting data. As a result, websites started showing more and more consent management modules -- i.e., Consent Banners -- the visitors have to interact with to access the website content. Since these banners change the content the browser loads, they challenge web measurement collection, primarily to monitor the extent of tracking technologies, but also to measure web performance. If not correctly handled, Consent Banners prevent crawlers from observing the actual content of the websites.
In this paper, we present a comprehensive measurement campaign focusing on popular websites in Europe and the US, visiting both landing and internal pages from different countries around the world. We engineer \TOOL, a Web crawler able to accept the Consent Banners, as most users would do in practice. It lets us compare how webpages change before and after accepting such policies, if present. Our results show that all measurements performed ignoring the Consent Banners offer a biased and partial view of the Web. After accepting the privacy policies, web tracking is far more pervasive, webpages are larger and slower to load
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