Internet Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Trackers...
summary
Presents a 20‑year longitudinal measurement showing third‑party tracking grows in prevalence and complexity from 1996–2016, using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and a tool the authors built called TrackingExcavator. Analyzes snapshots of the top 500 sites each year, simulates cookies despite archived-header quirks, quantifies missing resources and robots.txt removals, validates archive trends against live‑web ground truth, and finds dominant trackers (e.g., Google Analytics) reach far more sites and that pop‑up tracking spikes vanish after browser changes.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Motivation and background
- 2:38Retrospective measurements
- 5:10How web tracking works
- 7:31Tracking excavator tool
- 10:20Challenges in archives
- 13:54Validation of results
- 15:45Analyzing tracking trends
- 19:06Pop-ups and ecosystems
- 20:43Conclusion and Q&A
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