A Privacy Analysis of Cross-device Tracking

Online tracking is evolving from browser- and device-tracking to people-tracking. As users are increasingly accessing the Internet from multiple devices this new paradigm of tracking—in most cases for purposes of advertising—is aimed at crossing the boundary between a user’s individual devices and browsers. It establishes a person-centric view of a user across devices and seeks to combine the input from various data sources into an individual and comprehensive user profile. By its very nature such cross-device tracking can principally reveal a complete picture of a person and, thus, become more privacy-invasive than the siloed tracking via HTTP cookies or other traditional and more limited tracking mechanisms. In this study we are exploring cross-device tracking techniques as well as their privacy implications.

Particularly, we demonstrate a method to detect the occurrence of cross-device tracking, and, based on a cross-device tracking dataset that we collected from 126 Internet users, we explore the prevalence of cross-device trackers on mobile and desktop devices. We show that the similarity of IP addresses and Internet history for a user’s devices gives rise to a matching rate of F-1 = 0.91 for connecting a mobile to a desktop device in our dataset. This finding is especially noteworthy in light of the increase in learning power that cross-device companies may achieve by leveraging user data from more than one device. Given these privacy implications of cross-device tracking we also examine compliance with applicable self-regulation for 40 cross-device companies and find that some are not transparent about their practices.