OmniCrawl: Comprehensive Measurement of Web Tracking With Real Desktop and Mobile Browsers

Over half of all visits to websites now take place in a mobile browser, yet the majority of web privacy studies take the vantage point of desktop browsers, use emulated mobile browsers, or focus on just a single mobile browser instead. In this paper, we present a comprehensive web-tracking measurement study on mobile browsers and privacy-focused mobile browsers. Our study leverages a new web measurement infrastructure, OmniCrawl, which we develop to drive browsers on desktop computers and smartphones located on two continents. We capture web tracking measurements using 42 different non-emulated browsers simultaneously. We find that the third-party advertising and tracking ecosystem of mobile browsers is more similar to that of desktop browsers than previous findings suggested. We study privacy-focused browsers and find their protections differ significantly and in general are less for lower-ranked sites. Our findings also show that common methodological choices made by web measurement studies, such as the use of emulated mobile browsers and Selenium, can lead to website behavior that deviates from what actual users experience.

Validating the Strategic Task Overload Management (STOM) Model Using MATB II and Eye-tracking

Operators can be overloaded and struggle to make sense of and prioritize multiple tasks. Task selection in these cases is of utmost importance. We replicated an experiment using the Multi Attribute Task Battery II (MATB II) for validating a model of strategic task switching (STOM), adding eye tracking measurement, resulting in a new assessment. Task difficulty affected how operators switched tasks, while priority had little to no effect. Newly measured for STOM, eye tracking revealed a link between task difficulty and time spent performing a task but failed to meet predictions for interest and priority effects. The outcome of the validation effort as it relates to the STOM model, as well as eye tracking implications, are discussed.

A Comparative Measurement Study of Web Tracking on Mobile and Desktop Environments

Web measurement is a powerful approach to studying various tracking practices that may compromise the privacy of millions of users. Researchers have built several measurement frameworks and performed a few studies to measure web tracking on the desktop environment. However, little is known about web tracking on the mobile environment, and no tool is readily available for performing a comparative measurement study on mobile and desktop environments. In this work, we built a framework called WTPatrol that allows us and other researchers to perform web tracking measurement on both mobile and desktop environments. Using WTPatrol, we performed the first comparative measurement study of web tracking on 23,310 websites that have both mobile version and desktop version web-pages. We conducted an in-depth comparison of the web tracking practices of those websites between mobile and desktop environments from two perspectives: web tracking based on JavaScript APIs and web tracking based on HTTP cookies. Overall, we found that mobile web tracking has its unique characteristics especially due to mobile-specific trackers, and it has become increasingly as prevalent as desktop web tracking. However, the potential impact of mobile web tracking is more severe than that of desktop web tracking because a user may use a mobile device frequently in different places and be continuously tracked. We further gave some suggestions to web users, developers, and researchers to defend against web tracking.