Websites with hyper-partisan, left or right-leaning focus offer content that is typically biased towards the expectations of their target audience. Such content often polarizes users, who are repeatedly primed to specific (extreme) content, usually reflecting hard party lines on political and socio-economic topics. Though this polarization has been extensively studied with respect to content, it is still unknown how it associates with the online tracking experienced by browsing users, especially when they exhibit certain demographic characteristics. For example, it is unclear how such websites enable the ad-ecosystem to track users based on their gender or age. In this paper, we take a first step to shed light and measure such potential differences in tracking imposed on users when visiting specific party-line's websites. For this, we design and deploy a methodology to systematically probe such websites and measure differences in user tracking. This methodology allows us to create user personas with specific attributes like gender and age and automate their browsing behavior in a consistent and repeatable manner. Thus, we systematically study how personas are being tracked by these websites and their third parties, especially if they exhibit particular demographic properties. Overall, we test 9 personas on 556 hyper-partisan websites and find that right-leaning websites tend to track users more intensely than left-leaning, depending on user demographics, using both cookies and cookie synchronization methods and leading to more costly delivered ads.
Case Study: Disclosure of Indirect Device Fingerprinting in Privacy Policies
在线跟踪的最新发展使个人更难检测和阻止跟踪器。一些网站已经部署了间接跟踪方法，试图通过要求浏览器执行与安全无关的任务来唯一识别设备。一种类型的间接跟踪，Canvas指纹识别，使浏览器渲染图形记录渲染统计作为唯一标识符。在这项工作中，我们观察如何在隐私政策中披露间接设备指纹识别方法，并考虑披露是否足以使网站访问者阻止跟踪方法。我们将这些披露与相同网站上直接指纹识别方法的披露进行比较。我们的案例研究分析了一种间接指纹技术，画布指纹。我们使用现有的指纹识别技术的自动检测器来保守地检测其在Alexa Top 500网站上的使用，这些网站迎合了美国消费者，我们检查了由此产生的28个网站的隐私政策。间接指纹识别的披露在具体性上各不相同。没有人描述了足够粒度的具体方法来了解网站使用Canvas指纹识别。相反，许多网站确实提供了有关直接指纹识别方法使用的足够详细信息，以允许网站访问者可靠地检测和阻止这些技术。我们的结论是，间接指纹识别方法往往难以检测，并没有确定与隐私政策的特异性。这使得间接指纹更难阻止，因此有可能破坏目前个人和网站之间的暂时停战，以直接指纹。本文阐述了指纹识别方法的差异，并解释了为什么技术专家，技术律师和政策制定者需要理解间接指纹识别的挑战。
Bringing Cognitive Augmentation to Web Browsing Accessibility
Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）；University of Claude Bernard Lyon 1（里昂第一大学（克洛德·贝尔纳大学））
在本文中，我们将探讨认知增强带来的机会，以提供更自然和更方便的Web浏览体验。我们探索这些机会，通过\textit{conversational web browsing}，一个新兴的互动模式，使盲人和视障用户（BVIP），以及普通用户，通过会话代理访问网站的内容和功能。通知的文献，我们以前的工作和原型设计练习，我们得到一个概念框架，支持BVIP会话的Web浏览需求，然后专注于自动提供这种支持的挑战，描述我们的早期工作和原型，利用只考虑结构和内容功能的算法。
