Browsing behavior exposes identities on the Web

How easy is it to uniquely identify a person based solely on their web browsing behavior? Here we show that when people navigate the Web, their online traces produce fingerprints that identify them. Merely the four most visited web domains are enough to identify 95% of the individuals. These digital...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2024-06
Main Authors: Oliveira, Marcos, Yang, Junran, Griffiths, Daniel, Bonnay, Denis, Kulshrestha, Juhi
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Browsing
Data points
Fingerprints
Privacy
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:How easy is it to uniquely identify a person based solely on their web browsing behavior? Here we show that when people navigate the Web, their online traces produce fingerprints that identify them. Merely the four most visited web domains are enough to identify 95% of the individuals. These digital fingerprints are stable and render high re-identifiability. We demonstrate that we can re-identify 80% of the individuals in separate time slices of data. Such a privacy threat persists even with limited information about individuals' browsing behavior, reinforcing existing concerns around online privacy.
ISSN:2331-8422