2014/11/03 by Güneş Acar, Christian Eubank, Steven Englehardt +3 · 7 citations
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting #Privacy, Security, and Data Protection #Spam and Phishing Detection
paper · doi:10.1145/2660267.2660347
openalex publication_date 2014/11/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
We present the first large-scale studies of three advanced web tracking mechanisms - canvas fingerprinting, evercookies and use of "cookie syncing" in conjunction with evercookies. Canvas fingerprinting, a recently developed form of browser fingerprinting, has not previously been reported in the wild; our results show that over 5% of the top 100,000 websites employ it. We then present the first automated study of evercookies and respawning and the discovery of a new evercookie vector, IndexedDB. Turning to cookie syncing, we present novel techniques for detection and analysing ID flows and we quantify the amplification of privacy-intrusive tracking practices due to cookie syncing.