TrackMeOrNot: Enabling Flexible Control on Web Tracking

Overview

TrackMeOrNot is a web browser that enables users to selectively share their online footprints with vendors (trackers) while shielding privacy sensitive browsing activities from trackers.

TrackMeOrNot is implemented on Google Chromium (version 45.0.2426.3).

A user of TrackMeOrNot can specify URL policies and category policies as her/his tracking preference. All navigations in TrackMeOrNot start with an anonymous browsing context. The machine learning model in TrackMeOrNot automatically determines the topic of the content that the user is visiting. Based on the user's tracking preference, TrackMeOrNot can seamlessly switch to or stay in the expected browsing context (persistent or anonymous) to meet user's privacy need.

More information about TrackMeOrNot could be found in our WWW 2016 research paper [1].

Get TrackMeOrNot

The source code of TrackMeOrNot is available on GitHub here.

Please find the build instructions in the README file.

Data Set

The data set used in our research paper was created from the AOL query log. We visited all URLs that were clicked by an AOL user using the Python urllib2 library in September, 2015. The data set consists of three parts.

The data set used in our WWW 2016 research paper is available here.

The entire data set (9,868 MB) is split into 200 segments.

Note that the text contents in our data set were labeled with AlchemyAPI. We were only authorized to use AlchemyAPI for research purpose. We have not got the permission for releasing the labels publicly. If you are interested in obtaining a copy of the labels, please contact AlchemyAPI for permission.

License

TrackMeOrNot is licensed under the MIT License.

Copyright © 2016 Georgia Institute of Technology.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

References

[1] Wei Meng, Byoungyoung Lee, Xinyu Xing, Wenke Lee. TrackMeOrNot: Enabling Flexible Control on Web Tracking. In Proceedings of The 25th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), April 2016.