How Can and Would People Protect From Online Tracking?

Abstract

Online tracking is complex and users find itchallenging to protect themselves from it. While the aca-demic community has extensively studied systems andusers for tracking practices, the link between the dataprotection regulations, websites’ practices of presentingprivacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), and how userslearn about PETs and practice them is not clear. Thispaper takes a multidimensional approach to find such alink. We conduct a study to evaluate the 100 top EUwebsites, where we find that information about PETsis provided far beyond the cookie notice. We also findthat opting-out from privacy settings is not as easy asopting-in and becomes even more difficult (if not impos-sible) when the user decides to opt-out of previously ac-cepted privacy settings. In addition, we conduct an on-line survey with 614 participants across three countries(UK, France, Germany) to gain a broad understand-ing of users’ tracking protection practices. We find thatusers mostly learn about PETs for tracking protectionvia their own research or with the help of family andfriends. We find a disparity between what websites offeras tracking protection and the ways individuals reportto do so. Observing such a disparity sheds light on whycurrent policies and practices are ineffective in support-ing the use of PETs by users.