论文标题
停止跟踪我兄弟!在超党派网站上对用户人口统计的差异跟踪
Stop Tracking Me Bro! Differential Tracking Of User Demographics On Hyper-partisan Websites
论文作者
论文摘要
具有超党派,左或右倾的焦点的网站提供的内容通常会偏向于目标受众的期望。这种内容经常使用户两极时间,他们反复彩绘到特定的(极端)内容,通常反映出政治和社会经济主题的艰难党派。尽管对内容已经进行了广泛的研究,但它仍然未知与浏览用户经历的在线跟踪如何相关联,尤其是当他们表现出某些人口统计学特征时。例如,目前尚不清楚此类网站如何使AD-INECYSTEM能够根据用户的性别或年龄跟踪。在本文中,我们迈出了第一步,以阐明灯光并衡量在访问特定派对线网站时对用户施加的潜在差异。为此,我们设计和部署一种方法来系统地探测此类网站并测量用户跟踪的差异。这种方法使我们能够创建具有性别和年龄等特定属性的用户角色,并以一致且可重复的方式自动化其浏览行为。因此,我们系统地研究了这些网站及其第三方如何跟踪角色,尤其是在它们表现出特定的人口特性的情况下。总体而言,我们在556个超党派网站上测试了9个角色,发现右倾网站倾向于使用cookie和cookie同步方法,而不是用户人口统计学,倾向于比左倾的更强烈地跟踪用户,并导致更为成本的广告。
Websites with hyper-partisan, left or right-leaning focus offer content that is typically biased towards the expectations of their target audience. Such content often polarizes users, who are repeatedly primed to specific (extreme) content, usually reflecting hard party lines on political and socio-economic topics. Though this polarization has been extensively studied with respect to content, it is still unknown how it associates with the online tracking experienced by browsing users, especially when they exhibit certain demographic characteristics. For example, it is unclear how such websites enable the ad-ecosystem to track users based on their gender or age. In this paper, we take a first step to shed light and measure such potential differences in tracking imposed on users when visiting specific party-line's websites. For this, we design and deploy a methodology to systematically probe such websites and measure differences in user tracking. This methodology allows us to create user personas with specific attributes like gender and age and automate their browsing behavior in a consistent and repeatable manner. Thus, we systematically study how personas are being tracked by these websites and their third parties, especially if they exhibit particular demographic properties. Overall, we test 9 personas on 556 hyper-partisan websites and find that right-leaning websites tend to track users more intensely than left-leaning, depending on user demographics, using both cookies and cookie synchronization methods and leading to more costly delivered ads.