Cookie Synchronization: Everything You Always Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask
This addresses privacy risks for web users by revealing the widespread impact of CSync, though it is incremental as it builds on existing knowledge of tracking mechanisms.
The paper tackles the problem of Cookie Synchronization (CSync) in digital advertising by conducting an in-depth study using a year-long weblog from 850 mobile users, finding that 97% of users are exposed to CSync, with a median userID leaked to 3.5 domains and tracking domains increased by a factor of 6.75.
User data is the primary input of digital advertising, fueling the free Internet as we know it. As a result, web companies invest a lot in elaborate tracking mechanisms to acquire user data that can sell to data markets and advertisers. However, with same-origin policy, and cookies as a primary identification mechanism on the web, each tracker knows the same user with a different ID. To mitigate this, Cookie Synchronization (CSync) came to the rescue, facilitating an information sharing channel between third parties that may or not have direct access to the website the user visits. In the background, with CSync, they merge user data they own, but also reconstruct a user's browsing history, bypassing the same origin policy. In this paper, we perform a first to our knowledge in-depth study of CSync in the wild, using a year-long weblog from 850 real mobile users. Through our study, we aim to understand the characteristics of the CSync protocol and the impact it has on web users' privacy. For this, we design and implement CONRAD, a holistic mechanism to detect CSync events at real time, and the privacy loss on the user side, even when the synced IDs are obfuscated. Using CONRAD, we find that 97% of the regular web users are exposed to CSync: most of them within the first week of their browsing, and the median userID gets leaked, on average, to 3.5 different domains. Finally, we see that CSync increases the number of domains that track the user by a factor of 6.75.