URL-based Web Tracking Detection Using Deep Learning

The pervasiveness of online web tracking poses a constant threat to the privacy of Internet users. Millions of users currently employ content-blockers in their web browsers to block tracking resources in real time. Although content-blockers are based on blacklists, which are known to be difficult to maintain and easy to evade, the research community has not succeeded in replacing them with better alternatives yet. Most of the methods recently proposed in the literature obtain good detection accuracy, but at the expense of increasing their complexity and making them more difficult to maintain and configure by the end user. In this paper, we present a new web tracking detection method, called Deep Tracking Detector (DTD), that analyzes the properties of URL strings to detect tracking resources, without using any other external features. Consequently, DTD can easily be implemented in a browser plugin and operate in real time. Our experimental results, with more than 5M HTTP requests from 100K websites, show that DTD achieves a detection accuracy higher than 97% by looking only at the URL of the resources.