MPI-INF Logo
Campus Event Calendar

Event Entry

What and Who

Towards a Non-Tracking Web

Istemi Ekin Akkus
MMCI
SWS Student Defense Talks - Thesis Defense
SWS  
Public Audience
English

Date, Time and Location

Monday, 21 March 2016
14:00
90 Minutes
G26
111
Kaiserslautern

Abstract

Today, many publishers (e.g., websites, mobile application developers)
commonly use third-party analytics services and social widgets.
Unfortunately, this scheme allows these third parties to track
individual users across the web, creating privacy concerns and leading
to reactions to prevent tracking via blocking, legislation and
standards. While improving user privacy, these efforts do not consider
the functionality third-party tracking enables publishers to use: to
obtain aggregate statistics about their users and increase their
exposure to other users via online social networks. Simply preventing
third-party tracking without replacing the functionality it provides
cannot be a viable solution; leaving publishers without essential
services will hurt the sustainability of the entire ecosystem.

In this thesis, we present alternative approaches to bridge this gap
between privacy for users and functionality for publishers and other
entities. We first propose a general and interaction-based third-party
cookie policy that prevents third-party tracking via cookies, yet
enables social networking features for users when wanted, and does not
interfere with non-tracking services for analytics and advertisements.
We then present a system that enables publishers to obtain rich web
analytics information (e.g., user demographics, other sites visited)
without tracking the users across the web. While this system requires no
new organizational players and is practical to deploy, it necessitates
the publishers to pre-define answer values for the queries, which may
not be feasible for many analytics scenarios (e.g., search phrases used,
free-text photo labels). Our second system complements the first system
by enabling publishers to discover previously unknown string values to
be used as potential answers in a privacy-preserving fashion and with
low computation overhead for clients as well as servers. These systems
suggest that it is possible to provide non-tracking services with (at
least) the same functionality as today’s tracking services.

Contact

--email hidden

Video Broadcast

Yes
Saarbrücken
E1 5
029
passcode not visible
logged in users only

Maria-Louise Albrecht, 03/02/2016 10:54 -- Created document.