"Data Security in Website Tracking"
Companies use tracking services to collect data for targeted advertising. These tracking services collect troves of data, including what websites were accessed by users, the times they visited the websites, and location information. Due to the sensitivity of such information, many tracking service providers generalize datasets to anonymize the data for secure data protection. Generalization refers to the reduction of a dataset's level of detail so that it is impossible to identify individuals. Computer scientists from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Technical University of Dresden did a study on the effectiveness of dataset generalization in securing web tracking data. This article continues to discuss the types of data collected by tracking services, the use of generalization by tracking companies to protect data, how researchers tested the effectiveness of this method, and what observations were made by researchers during this study.