article
Control of Our Personal Data in the Big Data Era: The Case of Third Party Web Tracking
Autor
Gonzalez, Laura Daniela
Institución
Resumen
Hundreds of data brokers install technologies to track the browsing activities of people, this is called third-party web tracking. This paper is divided into two parts, the first part studies the web tracking in the context of the huge data industry which collects information from millions of sources to make profiles according to people's demographics, consumption practices, and their political interests, among others. We address the main commercial products and discriminatory risks arising from data profiling. In the second part, this paper reviews different regulations that aim at giving control to people over the data they produce through tracking technologies. In particular, the paper evaluates the effectiveness of the informed consent model. For this purpose, we examined the privacy policies of the ten most visited news web pages. This study revealed a low compliance of the minimum liberty and information standards needed to allow people to control the usage over the data collected through tracking technologies.