The Unwanted Sharing Economy: An Analysis of Cookie Syncing and User Transparency under GDP - Prof. Dr. Norbert Pohlmann
The Unwanted Sharing Economy: An Analysis of Cookie Syncing and User Transparency under GDPR | |
 | M. Degeling, T. Holz, N. Pohlmann, D. Tatang, T. Urban, The European General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR), which went into effect in May 2018, leads to important changes in this area: companies arenow required to ask for users’ consent before collecting and sharing personal data and by law usersnow have the right to gain access to the personalinformation collected about them. In this paper, we study and evaluate the effectof the GDPR on the online advertising ecosystem. In a first step, we measure the impact of the legislation on the connections (regarding cookie syncing) between third-parties and show that the general structure how the entities are arranged is not affected by the GDPR. However, we find that thenew regulation has a statistically significant impacton the number of connections, which shrinks byaround 40%. Furthermore, we analyze the right to data portability by evaluating thesubject access right process of popular companies in this ecosystem and observe differences between the processes implemented by the companies and how they interpret the new legislation. We exercised ourright of access under GDPR with 36 companies that hadtracked us online. Although 32 companies (89%) we inquired replied within the period defined bylaw, only 21 (58%) finished the process by the deadline set in the GDPR. Our work has implications regarding the implementation of privacy law as wellas what online tracking companies should do to bemore compliant with the new regulation. More information on the subject “Towards Understanding the Impact of the GDPR on Online Advertisement”: “Beyond the Front Page: Measuring Third Party Dynamics in the Field” kostenlos downloaden |
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