Who's Tracking Sensitive Domains?

Abstract

We turn our attention to the elephant in the room of data protection, which is none other than the simple and obvious question: "Who's tracking sensitive domains?". Despite a fast-growing amount of work on more complex facets of the interplay between privacy and the business models of the Web, the obvious question of who collects data on domains where most people would prefer not be seen, has received rather limited attention. First, we develop a methodology for automatically annotating websites that belong to a sensitive category, e.g. as defined by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Then, we extract the third party tracking services included directly, or via recursive inclusions, by the above mentioned sites. Having analyzed around 30k sensitive domains, we show that such domains are tracked, albeit less intensely than the mainstream ones. Looking in detail at the tracking services operating on them, we find well known names, as well as some less known ones, including some specializing on specific sensitive categories.