ePrivo.eu: An Online Service for Automatic Web Tracking Discovery

Abstract

Given the pervasiveness of web tracking practices on the Internet, many countries are developing and enforcing new privacy regulations to ensure the rights of their citizens. However, discovering websites that do not comply with those regulations is becoming very challenging, given the dynamic nature of the web or the use of obfuscation techniques. This work presents ePrivo, a new online service that can help Internet users, website owners, and regulators inspect how privacy-friendly a given website is. The system explores all the content of the website, including traffic from third parties and dynamically modified content. The ePrivo service combines different state-of-the-art tracking detection and classification methods, including TrackSign, to discover both previously known and zero-day tracking methods. After 6 months of service, ePrivo detected the largest browsing history trackers and more than 40k domains including cookies with a lifespan longer than one year, which is forbidden in some countries.

Keywords

• Fingerprinting
• privacy
• web tracking
• web embedding