Look Who's Tracking

• Main Authors: John Bailey, Mikael Laakso, Linus Nyman
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Informaatiotutkimuksen yhdistys ITY ry 2019-12-01
• Series: Informaatiotutkimus
• Subjects: cookies (files) [http://www.yso.fi/onto/yso/p8439]; tracking [http://www.yso.fi/onto/yso/p17497]; remote monitoring [http://www.yso.fi/onto/yso/p34193]; web pages [http://www.yso.fi/onto/yso/p4050]; privacy [http://www.yso.fi/onto/yso/p10909]
• Online Access: https://journal.fi/inf/article/view/87841

Though research into online tracking prevalence as a topic is not new, we still know little about who is tracking and profiling Finnish web users. This study examines tracking on the 500 websites most frequently visited by Finnish users. We also compare trackers on Finnish websites versus non-Finnish websites. We found trackers on 410 of the 500 websites, and a total of 466 unique trackers from 408 different organizations. Similar to most previous studies, Google had the greatest tracker coverage, mostly through Google Analytics and Doubleclick, reaching 75 % of the websites analyzed. The second-most prevalent tracking organization was Facebook, present on 46 % of the websites. After Google and Facebook came a number of organizations with fairly similar tracking coverage, followed by a long tail of others. There were notable differences when comparing Finnish websites to non-Finnish sites, displaying some level of geographical preference in publishers’ choices of advertising platforms and analytical tools.