Transcript Non-tracking Web Analytics Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ruichuan Chen, Michaela Hardt,

Non-tracking Web Analytics
Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ruichuan Chen, Michaela Hardt,
Paul Francis, Johannes Gehrke
Presentation by David Ferreras
The Scenario
• Publishers (Websites) want information from
their users, which they can’t obtain by
themselves.
• They have to obtain it through third party data
aggregators (Google, Facebook…), who track
users across the web.
The Scenario
The Problem
• To users:
– Privacy concerns about being tracked.
• To publishers:
– They have to trust data aggregators.
The Solution Proposed
• The client’s information is stored in a local
database.
• Publishers execute queries to this database
and it proxies client-aggregator
communication
The Solution Proposed
The Solution Proposed (Details)
• Publishers post queries at well-known URLs on
their websites.
• Queries formulated by publishers and the data
aggregator.
• Client allow to answer the queries.
• Noise is added to the data for hiding
individuals.
Data Verification
To prevent the publisher from:
• Isolating clients (dropping answers)
• Falsifying results
A nonce is used in what it’s called and Audit
Data Verification
Implementation
Client: Firefox addon
Publisher: server-side script (PHP)
Data aggregator: program in server (Java+PHP)
Conclusions
It’s a possible solution to get valuable data from users
without tracking them along the web.
My opinion:
• If users have to allow the publishers from geting data
from them, the majority won’t
• I don’t think data aggregators, who are the ruling
companies in internet, want to loose their power.
Any questions?