Web tracking is the practice by which operators of websites and third parties collect, store and share information about visitors’ activities on the World Wide Web. Analysis of a user's behaviour may be used to provide content that enables the operator to infer their preferences and may be of interest to various parties, such as advertisers. Web tracking can be part of visitor management.
The uses of web tracking include the following:
Advertising companies actively collect information about users and make profiles that are used to individualize advertisements. User activities include websites visited, watched videos, interactions on social networks, and online transactions. Websites like Netflix and YouTube collect information about what shows users watch, which helps them suggest more shows that they might like. Search engines like Google will keep a record of what users search for, which could help them suggest more relevant searches in the future.
Law enforcement agencies may use web tracking to spy on individuals and solve crimes.
Web analytics focuses more on the performance of a website as a whole. Web tracking will give insight on how a website is being used and see how long a user spends on a certain page. This can be used to see who may have the most interest in the content of the website.
Usability tests is the practice of testing how easy a design is to use. Users are observed as they complete tasks. This would help identify usability problems with a website's design so they can be fixed for easier navigation.
Every device connected to the Internet is assigned a unique IP address, which is needed to enable devices to communicate with each other. With appropriate software on the host website, the IP address of visitors to the site can be logged and can also be used to determine the visitor’s geographical location. Logging the IP address can, for example, monitor if a person voted more than once, as well as their viewing pattern. Knowing the visitor's location indicates, besides other things, the country.
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This advanced course will provide students with the knowledge to tackle the design of privacy-preserving ICT systems. Students will learn about existing technologies to prect privacy, and how to evalu
A device fingerprint or machine fingerprint is information collected about the software and hardware of a remote computing device for the purpose of identification. The information is usually assimilated into a brief identifier using a fingerprinting algorithm. A browser fingerprint is information collected specifically by interaction with the web browser of the device. Device fingerprints can be used to fully or partially identify individual devices even when persistent cookies (and zombie cookies) cannot be read or stored in the browser, the client IP address is hidden, or one switches to another browser on the same device.
Targeted advertising is a form of advertising, including online advertising, that is directed towards an audience with certain traits, based on the product or person the advertiser is promoting. These traits can either be demographic with a focus on race, economic status, sex, age, generation, level of education, income level, and employment, or psychographic focused on the consumer values, personality, attitude, opinion, lifestyle and interest.
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic and also the mobile app traffic & events, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin. As of 2019, Google Analytics is the most widely used web analytics service on the web. Google Analytics provides an SDK that allows gathering usage data from iOS and Android app, known as Google Analytics for Mobile Apps.
In this letter, we introduce an optimal transport framework for inferring power distributions over both spatial location and temporal frequency. Recently, it has been shown that optimal transport is a powerful tool for estimating spatial spectra that chang ...
Although encryption hides the content of communications from third parties, metadata, i.e., the information attached to the content (such as the size or timing of communication) can be a rich source of details and context. In this dissertation, we demonstr ...
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As third-party cookie blocking is becoming the norm in mainstream web browsers, advertisers and trackers have started to use first-party cookies for tracking. To understand this phenomenon, we conduct a differential measurement study with versus without th ...