Opted Out, Yet Tracked: Are Regulations Enough to Protect Your Privacy?

By Zengrui Liu, Umar Iqbal, Nitesh Saxena. 2022

31 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Data protection regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, require websites and embedded third-parties, especially advertisers, to seek user consent before they can collect and process user data. Only when the users opt in, should these entities collect, process, and share user data. Websites typically incorporate Consent Management Platforms (CMPs), such as OneTrust and CookieBot, to solicit and convey user consent to the embedded advertisers, with the expectation that the consent will be respected. However, neither the websites nor the regulators currently have any mechanism to audit advertisers' compliance with the user consent, i.e., to determine if advertisers indeed do not collect, process, and share user data when the user opts out. In this paper, we propose an auditing framework that leverages advertisers' bidding behavior to empirically assess the violations of data protection regulations. Using our framework, we conduct a measurement study to evaluate four of the most widely deployed CMPs, i.e., Didomi, Quantcast, OneTrust, and CookieBot, as well as advertiser-offered opt-out controls, i.e., National Advertising Initiative's opt-out, under GDPR and CCPA. Our results indicate that in many cases user data is unfortunately still being collected, processed, and shared even when users opt-out. We also find that some CMPs are better than the others at conveying user consent and that several ad platforms ignore user consent. Our results also indicate that advertiser-offered opt-out are equally ineffective at protecting user privacy.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Sociology and Political Science, Safety, Robustness & Interpretability

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Citations in the corpus

Evaluating the Social Impact of Generative AI Systems in Systems and Society (2023, background): “Upholding privacy regulations requires engagement from multiple affected parties [189] and can protect individuals but fail at loopholes, as seen with tracking continuing when an individual opts-out [42] from data collection [140].”