| dc.description.abstract | In the last years, web tracking has became a fast-growing phenomenon. Pro-
filing users to provide targeted advertisement is a business that counts hundreds
of companies and billions of dollars. On the other hand, communities,
researchers and other companies are building countermeasures to prevent
tracking practices, so the techniques are becoming more sophisticated and
hidden. This work has the goal of uncovering the obfuscation that is becoming
common in web tracking methods and, in particular a popular tracking
method called canvas fingerprinting. The proposed approach could also be
used in the future for other tracking techniques. Our tests seek also to uncover
web tracking methods not situated in the home pages, but in the sub
links, in order to discover if there is a substantial difference. We crawled
more than 830K links presents in the home pages of the first 5K most visited
web sites according to Alexa’s ranking. Our tool uncovered the real calls
of the canvas fingerprinting method toDataURL(), making it impossible to
hide by web trackers. The results showed that 12% of the analyzed domains
have plain-text canvas fingerprinting methods in the home page, while 1,2%
uses obfuscation and 86,8% is canvas free. On the other hand, when we analyzed
the sub links, the percentage increased to 30,5% for plain-text canvas fingerprinting and to 10,5% for the obfuscated one, while only 59% of the
domains were canvas free. In addition, we uncovered 2695 trackers and just
the 3 most popular covered more than 20% of the visited domains. Finally
we analyzed the files from where the tracking method was called, and we
found out that the same tracking code is used in many different domains;
the most widespread was tanxssp.js, present in 71 different domains. |
