Towards Seamless Tracking-Free Web: Improved Detection of Trackers via One-class Learning
Muhammad Talha Ikram, Asghar Hassan Jameel, Kaafar Mohamed Ali, Anirban Mahanti, Balachandar Krishnamurthy · DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2017
Numerous tools have been developed to aggressively block the execution of popular JavaScript programs in Web browsers. Such blocking also affects functionality of webpages and impairs user experience. As a consequence, many privacy preserving tools that have been developed to limit online tracking, often executed via JavaScript programs, may suffer from poor performance and limited uptake. A mechanism that can isolate JavaScript programs necessary for proper functioning of the website from tracking JavaScript programs would thus be useful. Through the use of a manually labelled dataset composed of 2,612 JavaScript programs, we show how current privacy preserving tools are ineffective in finding the right balance between blocking tracking JavaScript programs and allowing functional JavaScript code. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to assess the performance of current web privacy preserving tools in determining tracking vs. functional JavaScript programs.