Titre : Tracking, countermeasures and their effectiveness in targeted advertising 

Auteurs : Robert Viseur,  

Revue : Open Journal in Information Systems Engineering 

Numéro : Issue 1 

Volume : 2 

Date : 2021/01/19 

DOI : 10.21494/ISTE.OP.2021.0603 

ISSN : 2634-1468 

Résumé : From a Web of documents of uncertain commercial interest, driven by pioneers believing in knowledge sharing, the Web later evolved into a collaborative, real-time form that was made profitable by advertising. The latter has evolved towards targeted advertising, including behavioral advertising based on the massive collection of usage traces. These traces come from various tracking devices including IP addresses (IP tracking), the now known cookies or fingerprints (e.g. browser fingerprinting and canvas fingerprinting). While the collection was initially limited to the workstation (mainly through the browser), it was later extended to smartphones and connected objects. This led to the trace marketing and attention economy that digital natives were confronted with at an early stage. Various countermeasures were gradually deployed by users (parameterization, extensions, e.g. ad blockers), by anonymization services (e.g. VPN and proxy), by the publishers themselves or by the regulator (e.g. RGPD). This paper proposes, on the one hand, a presentation of the structuring of the online advertising sector followed by a state of the art on the tracking tools deployed there, on the other hand, an inventory and analysis of the countermeasures deployed as well as their effectiveness. We show in particular the rapid evolution of the techniques used and the heterogeneity of the coverage offered by a priori equivalent protective devices. 

Éditeur : ISTE OpenScience