4. Studies using OpenWPM

4.1. Data collected by WebTAP

Since 2015, WebTAP has conducted a web census to study third-party online tracking. Each month between 2015-2018, they visited the web’s 1 million most popular sites using OpenWPM and record data pertaining to user privacy, including cookies, fingerprinting scripts, the effect of browser privacy tools, and the exchange of tracking data between different sites (“cookie syncing”).

WebTAP has released the entire Princeton Web Census data — about 15 terabytes — containing privacy measurements of 1 million sites conducted each month from December 2015 to June 2018.

4.2. List of Studies that have used OpenWPM

Year

Venue

Study Name

2014

ACM CCS

The Web Never Forgets: Persistent Tracking Mechanisms in the Wild

2014

ACM CoSN

Cognitive disconnect: Understanding Facebook Connect login permissions

2015

WWW

Cookies that give you away: The surveillance implications of web tracking

2015

NDSS

Upgrading HTTPS in midair: HSTS and key pinning in practice

2015

Tech Science

Web privacy census

2015

W2SP

Variations in tracking in relation to geographic location

2016

IFIP AICT

Evaluating Websites and Their Adherence to Data Protection Principles

2016

ACM CCS

Online Tracking: A 1-million-site Measurement and Analysis

2016

WWW

No honor among thieves: A large-scale analysis of malicious web shells

2017

NDSS

Dial One for Scam: A Large-Scale Analysis of Technical Support Scams

2017

PETS

Cross-Device Tracking: Measurement and Disclosures

2017

CODASPY

Identifying HTTPS-Protected Netflix Videos in Real-Time

2017

WWW

De-anonymizing Web Browsing Data with Social Networks [1]

2017

IWPE

Battery Status Not Included: Assessing Privacy in Web Standards

2017

Annual Privacy Forum

PrivacyScore: Improving Privacy and Security via Crowd-Sourced Benchmarks of Websites

2017

arXiv

Horcrux: A Password Manager for Paranoids

2017

USENIX Security

Measuring the Insecurity of Mobile Deep Links of Android

2017

Applied Economics Letters

Online advertising networks and consumer perceptions of privacy

2018

PETS

When the cookie meets the blockchain: Privacy risks of web payments via cryptocurrencies

2018

PETS

I never signed up for this! Privacy implications of email tracking

2018

ACM TOIT

Measuring third party tracker power across web and mobile

2018

CALIcon

Third Party Trackers on Law School Library Websites

2018

Master Thesis, Delft University of Technology

Tracking Cookies in the European Union, an Empirical Analysis of the Current Situation

2018

ACM CCS

The Web’s Sixth Sense: A Study of Scripts Accessing Smartphone Sensors

2018

ACSAC

Raising the Bar: Evaluating Origin-wide Security Manifests

2018

arXiv

The Unwanted Sharing Economy: An Analysis of Cookie Syncing and User Transparency under GDPR

2018

PhD thesis, Princeton University

Automated discovery of privacy violations on the web

2018

AINTEC’18

Understanding abusive web resources: characteristics and counter-measures of malicious web resources and cryptocurrency mining

2018

ACSAC

Raising the Bar: Evaluating Origin-wide Security Manifests

2018

SSRN

Acquisitions in the Third Party Tracking Industry: Competition and Data Protection Aspects

2019

Communications in Computer and Information Science

Transparency in Keyword Faceted Search: An Investigation on Google Shopping

2019

arXiv

The Price of Free Illegal Live Streaming Services

2019

Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing

Usage of HTTPS by Municipal Websites in Portugal

2019

ConPro

The Impact of User Location on Cookie Notices (Inside and Outside of the European Union)

2019

WWW

Before and After GDPR: The Changes in Third Party Presence at Public and Private European Websites

2019

IEEE EuroS&P

TraffickStop: Detecting and Measuring Illicit Traffic Monetization Through Large-Scale DNS Analysis

2019

SSRN

The Market for Data Privacy

2019

ACM CSCW

Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites

2019

Computer Communications

A comparison of web privacy protection techniques

2019

DPM

On Privacy Risks of Public WiFi Captive Portals

2019

Computers & Security

Towards a global perspective on web tracking

2019

APF

Towards Transparency in Email Tracking

2019

RAID

Talon: An Automated Framework for Cross-Device Tracking Detection

2019

ACM CCS

Watching You Watch: The Tracking Ecosystem of Over-the-Top TV Streaming Devices

2019

ACM IMC

Tales from the Porn: A Comprehensive Privacy Analysis of the Web Porn Ecosystem

2019

IEEE EuroS&P

TraffickStop: Detecting and Measuring Illicit Traffic Monetization Through Large-scale DNS Analysis

2019

The New York Times

I Visited 47 Sites. Hundreds of Trackers Followed Me.

2019

The Washington Post

Think you’re anonymous online? A third of popular websites are ‘fingerprinting’ you.

2019

ESORICS

Fingerprint surface-based detection of web bot detectors

2019

DPM

A Study on Subject Data Access in Online Advertising after the GDPR

2019

IEEE SPW

After GDPR, Still Tracking or Not? Understanding Opt-Out States for Online Behavioral Advertising

2020

PETS

Missed by Filter Lists: Detecting Unknown Third-Party Trackers with Invisible Pixels

2020

PETS

Inferring Tracker-Advertiser Relationships in the Online Advertising Ecosystem using Header Bidding

2020

PETS

A Comparative Measurement Study of Web Tracking on Mobile and Desktop Environments

2020

PETS

No boundaries: data exfiltration by third parties embedded on web pages

2020

PETS

In-Depth Evaluation of Redirect Tracking and Link Usage

2020

The Web Conference

The Representativeness of Automated Web Crawls as a Surrogate for Human Browsing [2]

2020

The Web Conference

Apophanies or Epiphanies? How Crawlers Impact Our Understanding of the Web

2020

The Web Conference

Stop Tracking me Bro! Differential Tracking of User Demographics on Hyper-partisan Websites [2]

2020

The Web Conference

Beyond the Front Page: Measuring Third Party Dynamics in the Field

2020

ACM ASIACCS

Measuring the Impact of the GDPR on Data Sharing in Ad Networks

2020

arXiv

Actions speak louder than words: Semi-supervised learning for browser fingerprinting detection

2020

PAM

Extortion or Expansion? An investigation into the costs and consequences of ICANN’s gTLD experiments

2020

Bachelor Thesis, Radboud University

Design and implementation of a stealthy OpenWPM web scraper

2020

IWPE

On Compliance of Cookie Purposes with the Purpose Specification Principle

2020

FTC PrivacyCon

Unaccounted Privacy Violation: A Comparative Analysis of Persistent Identification of Users Across Social Contexts

2020

IEEE EuroS&P

Multi-country Study of Third Party Trackers from Real Browser Histories

2020

TMA

Characterizing CNAME Cloaking-Based Tracking on the Web

2020

TMA

Clash of the Trackers: Measuring the Evolution of the Online Tracking Ecosystem

2020

WEIS

The Impact of the GDPR on Content Providers

2020

PhD Thesis, University of Michigan

Enhancing System Transparency, Trust, and Privacy with Internet Measurement

2020

Masters Thesis, Concordia University

A Large-Scale Evaluation of Privacy Practices of Public WiFi Captive Portals

2020

IEEE Globecom

A machine learning approach for detecting CNAME cloaking-based tracking on the Web

2021

NDSS

Reining in the Web’s Inconsistencies with Site Policy

2021

PETS

Unveiling Web Fingerprinting in the Wild Via Code Mining and Machine Learning

2021

IEEE S&P

Fingerprinting the Fingerprinters: Learning to Detect Browser Fingerprinting Behaviors

Footnotes