"New Web Tracking Technique is Bypassing Privacy Protections"

For decades, advertisers and online trackers have been able to aggregate users' information across all of the websites they visit, mostly through the placement of third-party cookies in users' browsers. Prioritizing user privacy, numerous browsers, including Safari, Firefox, and Brave, began blocking third-party cookies for all users by default two years ago. This poses a problem for corporations that put advertisements on the Internet on behalf of other businesses and rely on cookies to track click-through rates to estimate how much they must be paid. Advertisers have responded by developing user ID (or UID) smuggling, a new method for tracking users across the web. This method does not require third-party cookies. A measurement tool called CrumbCruncher, developed by researchers at UC San Diego, has, for the first time, attempted to quantify the prevalence of UID smuggling in the wild. CrumbCruncher navigates the Internet like a typical user, but keeps track of the number of times it has been tracked using UID smuggling. The researchers discovered that UID smuggling was present in around 8 percent of CrumbCruncher's navigations. They presented these findings at the Internet Measurement Conference in Nice, France, from October 25 to 27, 2022. The team is also making their whole dataset and measurement pipeline available to browser developers. Audrey Randall, a Ph.D. student in computer science at UC San Diego and the paper's lead author, stated that the team's primary objective is to raise browser developers' awareness of the issue. She stated that UID smuggling is more prevalent than anticipated. It is unknown how much of it poses a privacy risk to users. This article continues to discuss the new UID smuggling web tracking technique bypassing privacy protections and the CrumbCruncher tool developed by researchers at UC San Diego to quantify the frequency of UID smuggling in the wild.

UC San Diego reports "New Web Tracking Technique is Bypassing Privacy Protections"