Evolution of web tracking protection in Chrome

Abstract

In our society, protecting users’ privacy is of utmost importance, especially when users access websites. Increased awareness of privacy concerns has led web browsers to implement new mechanisms to improve privacy while browsing the Internet. In each new version of web browsers, it is claimed that they provide better improvements to protect our privacy. However, there is no analysis of these improvements. To cope with this issue, in this paper, we present an analysis of the privacy of different versions of the Chrome web browser. This analysis is based on the PrivacyScanner tool, which we have improved with the detection of additional tracking techniques. Our findings reveal that tracking protection has seen modest enhancements (namely, between Chrome version 83 and 90, we observed a 7.55% reduction in trackers and 4.76% decrease in Google Analytics elements). Therefore, despite these improvements, there is still ample room for further enhancement.