Tracking Transparency as a potential case study for PAOHviz
Description
Tracking Transparency is a browser extension that visualizes long-term, longitudinal information about what third party-trackers might infer from users' online browsing. Internet companies regularly track users' online activity to make inferences about their interests, which are then used to target ads and personalize their web experiences. Prior work has shown that users have a limited understanding of online tracking, and that existing tools fail to provide a complete picture of the extent of tracking. Tracking Transparency aims to provide information that advertising companies have little incentive to provide and is otherwise onerous for users to obtain and understand. Using data collected by the extension, PAOHviz can synthesize and display connections and trends between trackers in a user's browsing, the pages a user visited, and interests that trackers may have inferred. For example, these visualizations can help users answer questions such as, "In the past X days, on which web pages has a given tracker tracked me?", "Which interests has a given tracker inferred about me?" or "From which web pages did a given tracker infer my interest in a given topic?"
Publications
In progress