Proceedings of the 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences j 2018 Web Tracking – A Literature Review on the State of Research Tatiana Ermakova Benedict Bender University of Potsdam University of Potsdam
[email protected] [email protected] Benjamin Fabian Kerstin Klimek HfT Leipzig University of Potsdam
[email protected] [email protected] Abstract (Fabian et al., 2015; Bender et al., 2016). Hence, driven by a variety of enabling techniques (Besson et Web tracking seems to become ubiquitous in online al., 2014; Sanchez-Rola et al., 2016), web tracking has business and leads to increased privacy concerns of become ubiquitous on the Web (Roesner et al., 2012), users. This paper provides an overview over the across websites and even across devices (Brookman et current state of the art of web-tracking research, al., 2017). Besides targeted advertising (Sanchez-Rola aiming to reveal the relevance and methodologies of et al., 2016; Parra-Arnau, 2017), web tracking can be this research area and creates a foundation for future employed for personalization (Sanchez-Rola et al., work. In particular, this study addresses the following 2016; Mayer & Mitchell, 2012; Roesner et al., 2012), research questions: What methods are followed? What advanced web site analytics, social network integration results have been achieved so far? What are potential (Mayer & Mitchell, 2012; Roesner et al., 2012), and future research areas? For these goals, a structured website development (Fourie & Bothma, 2007). literature review based upon an established For online users, especially mature, well-off and methodological framework is conducted. The identified educated individuals, who constitute the most preferred articles are investigated with respect to the applied target group of web tracking (Peacock, 2015), the web research methodologies and the aspects of web tracking practices also imply higher privacy losses tracking they emphasize.