TrackCrawler is an optimized crawler through dynamic interactions + preference counting to understand changes in tracking in modern web applications from GDPR. This serves as the codebase for TrackCrawler.
Author: Mike Zeng
Note: This project is a reference for TrackCrawler. TrackCrawler is a complete rework of the old scrapper including a significantly wider scope for research and a different research purpose (understanding tracking at a wider scale vs just cookies).
A web scrapper for understanding cookies. This is the codebase for our paper "Understanding the Effect of GDPR-like Policies for Cookies in Web Applications".
Authors: Mike Zeng, Frank Forliano
Majority of websites use cookies, as a direct consequence of needing data. In the past, they have caused many violations to privacy laws like GDPR or CCPA. The EU has made many lawsuits to companies for breaking GDPR laws, and by using a web scraper, we found out that these policies and enforcements have been working sufficiently well at reducing cookie usage in web applications, and causing the overall amount of cookies that load initially to decrease as compared to places that do not have such GDPR-like policies.
The full length paper can be found in the repository.