A Measurement Study of Online Tracking and Advertising in Ibero-America

Abstract

The ability of the online marketing industry to track and profile users’ Web-browsing activity is what enables effective, tailored-made advertising services. The intrusiveness of these practices and the increasing invasiveness of digital advertising, however, have raised serious concerns regarding user privacy. Although the level of ubiquity of tracking and advertising has been investigated in top-world sites based in North America and Western Europe, the extent to which those practices are carried out in territories with less or no legal coverage —in terms of data protection— has not been studied so far. In this work, we present the first detailed measurement of online tracking and advertising conducted to date in one of those regions, namely, Ibero-America, by analyzing local websites (e.g., education and government sites). In doing so, our measurement study aims to find out how user location as well as the type of publisher may impact on tracking and advertising and thus user privacy. Lastly, our thorough, extensive analysis also explores whether differences are appreciated between Latin America and the EU with regard to the third-party tracking conducted from and towards the corresponding countries.

Keywords

• Online tracking
• advertising
• privacy risks
• Ibero-America