On the modern web, trackers and advertisers frequently construct and monetize users’ detailed behavioral profiles without consent. Despite various studies on web tracking mechanisms and advertisements, there has been no rigorous study focusing on websites targeted at children. To address this gap, we present a measurement of tracking and (targeted) advertising on websites directed at children. Motivated by the lack of a comprehensive list of child-directed (i.e., targeted at children) websites, we first build a multilingual classifier based on web page titles and descriptions. Applying this classifier to over two million pages from the Common Crawl dataset, we compile a list of two thousand child-directed websites.
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Targeted and Troublesome: Tracking and Advertising on Children’s Websites
A measurement of tracking and (targeted) advertising on websites directed at children indicates a trend of non-compliance with privacy regulations and troubling ad safety practices among many advertisers and child-directed websites.