Variations in Tracking in Relation to Geographic Location
This addresses the problem of understanding the effectiveness of privacy regulations for policymakers and internet users, but it is incremental as it extends existing methods to new geographic data.
The study investigated how different countries' privacy regulatory models affect online tracking and advertising by analyzing cookies and HTTP requests from browsing sessions in various countries, finding significant differences in tracking activity between countries.
Different countries have different privacy regulatory models. These models impact the perspectives and laws surrounding internet privacy. However, little is known about how effective the regulatory models are when it comes to limiting online tracking and advertising activity. In this paper, we propose a method for investigating tracking behavior by analyzing cookies and HTTP requests from browsing sessions originating in different countries. We collect browsing data from visits to top websites in various countries that utilize different regulatory models. We found that there are significant differences in tracking activity between different countries using several metrics. We also suggest various ways to extend this study which may yield a more complete representation of tracking from a global perspective.