The web is watching you: A comprehensive review of web-tracking techniques and countermeasures

Web tracking is a commonly-used practice on the Internet devoted to retrieve user information for activities such as personalization or advertisement. These techniques are said to drive the web economy, although they are commonly used to invade users’ privacy. In the last years, a general concern raised about web tracking, looking forward to combat it in many ways like regulations, anti-tracking methods and even standardization. In this paper, we analyze and discuss the current techniques for web-tracking as well as techniques for its detection and analysis, and countermeasures to prevent web tracking.

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