European Open Web Privacy Measurement

It is well-known that webpages collect personal information about the user, but little is known about the European-wide patterns in this collection. Over a period of one year, this project examines the activity of so-called third-party servers during the user's visit to a webpage. For the purpose +1700 websites from all European countries (both within and outside the EU) has been selected. As Englehardt & Narayanan (2016) have shown, the number of third-party servers varies for different categories of webpages. News webpages are among those with the highest number, while webpages belonging to NGOs, universities and governments are among the those with the lowest number. This research test that finding on a selection of European sites. Particularly, it examines webpages from public service media, as they could fall into both categories. The research furthermore aims to map the production ecology of the media and advertising websites, continuing research by Lindskow (2016). Finally, as the EU privacy regulation "GDPR" comes into force in the project period, the research aims to detect possible changes in the behaviour of the third-party servers that can be correlated to GDPR.