New Methods for Targeted Advertising and User Tracking on the Internet
Léo Le Taro · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2015
Internet usage is increasing every day. Nowadays, since the advent of smartphones, smart tablets and smart watches, people tend to be permanently online, even in mobility conditions. Free Wi-Fi connectivity is provided in public areas such as parks, coffee shops and airports, and is becoming the norm: people are expecting it. This trend led free Wi-Fi providers and other network agents to look for ways of monetizing their networks through targeted advertising and user tracking. However, this may be problematic because of the resulting privacy concerns. In this thesis, we identify the possible ways of carrying out such actions, as well as methods that have been designed by the research community to study their impact. We then present WALTER, a tool which focuses on detecting content injection in downstream HTTP traffic.