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Before and After GDPR: The Changes in Third Party Presence at Public and Private European Websites

Published: 13 May 2019 Publication History

Abstract

The commencement of EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has led to massive compliance and consent activities on websites. But did the new regulation result in fewer third party server appearances? Based on an eight months longitudinal study from February to September 2018 of 1250 popular websites in Europe and US, we present a mapping of the subtle shifts in the third party topology before and after May 25, 2018. The 1250 websites cover 39 European countries from EU, EEA, and outside EU, belonging to categories that cover both public-oriented citizen services, as well as commercially-oriented sites. The developments in the numbers and types of third party vary for categories of websites and countries. Analyzing the number of third parties over time, even though we notice a decline in the number of third parties in websites belonging to certain categories, we are cautious about attributing these effects to the general assumption that GDPR would lead to less third party activity. We believe that it is quite difficult to draw conclusions on cause-effect relationships in such a complex environment with many impacting factors.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
WWW '19: The World Wide Web Conference
May 2019
3620 pages
ISBN:9781450366748
DOI:10.1145/3308558
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • IW3C2: International World Wide Web Conference Committee

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 13 May 2019

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Author Tags

  1. GDPR
  2. General Data Protection Regulation
  3. Public Services
  4. Third-Party web server
  5. Tracker
  6. Web measurement

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WWW '19
WWW '19: The Web Conference
May 13 - 17, 2019
CA, San Francisco, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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    Does Privacy Regulation Harm Content Providers? 

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    SSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4239013Online publication date: 2024
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