On the Ubiquity of Web Tracking: Insights from a Billion-Page Web Crawl

We perform a large-scale analysis of third-party trackers on the World Wide Web from more than 3.5 billion web pages of the CommonCrawl 2012 corpus. We extract a dataset containing more than 140 million third-party embeddings in over 41 million domains. To the best of our knowledge, this constitutes the largest web tracking dataset collected so far, and exceeds related studies by more than an order of magnitude in the number of domains and web pages analyzed. We perform a large-scale study of online tracking, on three levels: (1) On a global level, we give a precise figure for the extent of tracking, give insights into the structure of the `online tracking sphere' and analyse which trackers are used by how many websites. (2) On a country-specific level, we analyse which trackers are used by websites in different countries, and identify the countries in which websites choose significantly different trackers than in the rest of the world. (3) We answer the question whether the content of websites influences the choice of trackers they use, leveraging more than 90 thousand categorized domains. In particular, we analyse whether highly privacy-critical websites make different choices of trackers than other websites. Based on the performed analyses, we confirm that trackers are widespread (as expected), and that a small number of trackers dominates the web (Google, Facebook and Twitter). In particular, the three tracking domains with the highest PageRank are all owned by Google. The only exception to this pattern are a few countries such as China and Russia. Our results suggest that this dominance is strongly associated with country-specific political factors such as freedom of the press. We also confirm that websites with highly privacy-critical content are less likely to contain trackers (60% vs 90% for other websites), even though the majority of them still do contain trackers.