#GESISGuide #Webtracking
New GESIS Guide published: “Overview of Working with Web Tracking Data”
Mangold, F., & Stier, S. (2025). Overview of Working with Web Tracking Data (GESIS Guides to Digital Behavioral Data, 23). Cologne: GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.
https://doi.org/10.60762/ggdbd25023.1.0
How can web tracking be used as a method for studying digital media use and online behavior? How does web tracking data collections differ from other digital research methods ?
#mte #meettheexperts #webtracking #datacollection
New #video on #YouTube:Meet our Experts Dr. Joachim Piepenburg and Dr. Frank Mangold who showcase research that linked surveys and #webtracking, present the data collection infrastructure and introduce how the academic community can participate in the data collections and use the collected data.
#Call for Research Proposals: Collect Your Own Linked #WebTracking and #SurveyData with the New GESIS Panel.dbd Digital Behavioral Data Sample:
Participate in repeated surveys and digital behavioral data collections within the GESIS Panel.dbd.
#Privacy #DataProtection #WebTracking #WebXray: "A lot of this leaking data is not just potentially embarrassing, or perhaps harmful to career prospects if it were to be made public, but outright illegal. Over the past half-decade, the European Union, a number of US states, and other governments around the world have enacted laws that restrict what kind of data websites can collect, or require a company to receive consent from a user before it does so. Every day, tech companies may violate those laws when, say, search engines and medical websites trample HIPAA by allowing search logs of users’ ailments to be tracked, documented, and sometimes monetized by companies like Google, or running roughshod over consent rules by turning a blind eye to advertising cookies embedded in publishers’ websites.
This, Libert says, is why he developed WebXray, a crude prototype of which he’s demoing for me right now. It’s a search engine for rooting out specific privacy violations anywhere on the web. By searching for a specific term or website, you can use WebXray to see which sites are tracking you, and where all that data goes. Its mission, he says, is simple; “I want to give privacy enforcers equal technology as privacy violators.” To level the playing field.
On Thursday, Libert plans to launch the website to the public, so anyone can get a sense of how sprawling the web of privacy violations being made every day really is, along with a premium tier for regulators and attorneys, who can use the tool to assess those violations and address them. Libert knows a thing or two about both search engines and digital privacy. Until last year, he was a staff engineer on the privacy team at Google, which is of course the operator of the largest search engine in the world—and the largest collector of data of the billions of people who use it."
https://www.wired.com/story/webxray-online-privacy-violations/
#USA #USPS #DataProtection #Privacy #WebTracking: "In our testing, TechCrunch discovered that the USPS website shared the postal address of a logged-in USPS Informed Delivery customer with Meta, LinkedIn and Snap. TechCrunch tested this by inspecting the network traffic using tools baked into most modern browsers.
Our testing showed the data-collecting code on USPS’ website was scraping the customer’s address from the Informed Delivery landing page after customers logged in, and then sending it to the companies.
The code also collected other data, such as information about the user’s computer type and browser, which appeared as partly pseudonymized — essentially scrambled in a way that makes it more difficult for humans to know where data came from, or who it relates to, by using randomized identifiers in place of real customer names. But researchers have long warned that pseudonymous data can still be used to re-identify seemingly anonymous individuals.
TechCrunch also found that tracking numbers entered into the USPS website were also shared with advertisers and tech companies, including Bing, Google, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Snap. Some in-transit tracking data was also shared, such as the real-world location of the mail in the postal system, even if the customer was not logged in to USPS’ website."
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/18/usps-shared-customer-postal-addresses-with-meta-linkedin-and-snap/
#Privacy #Surveillance #WebTracking #Google #DataProtection #GoogleChrome: "After years of growing criticism over invasive ad tracking, Google announced in September 2023 that it would phase out third-party cookies from its Chrome browser . Since then, users have been gradually tricked into enabling a supposed “ad privacy feature” that actually tracks people. While the so-called “Privacy Sandbox” is advertised as an improvement over extremely invasive third-party tracking, the tracking is now simply done within the browser by Google itself. To do this, the company theoretically needs the same informed consent from users. Instead, Google is tricking people by pretending to “Turn on an ad privacy feature”. noyb has therefore filed a complaint with the Austrian data protection authority."
https://noyb.eu/en/google-sandbox-online-tracking-instead-privacy
#Google #BigTech #Privacy #Chrome #WebTracking #Surveillance #DataProtection: "Google agreed to destroy billions of records to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly tracked the internet use of people who thought they were browsing privately in its Chrome browser’s incognito mode.
Users alleged that Google’s analytics, cookies and apps let the Alphabet unit improperly track people who set Google’s Chrome browser to “incognito” mode and other browsers to “private” browsing mode.
Plaintiffs said letting Google had an ‘unaccountable trove of information’ from learning about what they seek out online.
They said this turned Google into an “unaccountable trove of information” by letting it learn about their friends, favorite foods, hobbies, shopping habits and the “most intimate and potentially embarrassing things” they hunt for online.
Terms of the settlement were filed on Monday in the Oakland, California, federal court, and require approval by US district judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. The class action began in 2020, covering millions of Google users who used private browsing since 1 June 2016.
Under the settlement, Google will update disclosures about what it collects in “private” browsing, a process it has already begun. It will also let incognito users block third-party cookies for five years." https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/01/google-destroying-browsing-data-privacy-lawsuit
Distrust of 'mainstream' media has led to the rise of hyperpartisan sources for political information. But who are the consumers of these sources? How are alternative media websites interconnected, and what content do they present?
Read this paper by Pu Yan (Peking University) and Ralph Schroeder (@oiioxford) via Weizenbaum Journal:
https://doi.org/10.34669/WI.WJDS/4.2.2
#populism #media #mediaattention #webtracking #socialscience #wjds #openaccess #fakenews @WZB_Berlin @FOKUSpublic
