Year: 2025
Type: preprint
Abstract: Web tracking is a pervasive and opaque practice that enables personalized advertising, retargeting, and conversion tracking. Over time, it has evolved into a sophisticated and invasive ecosystem, employing increasingly complex techniques to monitor and profile users across the web. The research community has a long track record of analyzing new web tracking techniques, designing and evaluating the effectiveness of countermeasures, and assessing compliance with privacy regulations. Despite a substantial body of work on web tracking, the literature remains fragmented across distinctly scoped studies, making it difficult to identify overarching trends, connect new but related techniques, and identify research gaps in the field. Today, web tracking is undergoing a transformation, driven by fundamental shifts in the advertising industry, the adoption of anti-tracking countermeasures by browsers, and the growing enforcement of emerging privacy regulations. This Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) aims to consolidate and synthesize this wide-ranging research, offering a comprehensive overview of the technical mechanisms, countermeasures, and regulations that shape the modern and rapidly evolving web tracking landscape. This SoK also highlights open challenges and outlines directions for future research.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Institutions: University of California, Davis, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Radboud University Nijmegen, Centre Inria d'Université Côte d'Azur, Washington University in St. Louis, North Carolina State University, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Stony Brook University, University of Illinois Chicago, University of Washington, Wesleyan University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: Fingerprinting And CPU Attack and Defense Exploration from browser Scripts, CAREER: Tracking on the Modern Web: Novel Attacks, Measurements, and Defenses, SaTC: CORE: Small: Studying Problematic Content in the Web Advertising Ecosystem, SaTC: CORE: Frontier: Collaborative: End-to-End Trustworthiness of Machine-Learning Systems, CAREER: Web Evolution and Emerging Threats, Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: Defending against Emerging Stateless Web Tracking, proTect Users from onLine manIPulation
OpenAlex ID: W4415311479
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