10th International Congress on Information and Communication Technology

Authors - Timi Heino, Robin Carlsson, Panu Puhtila, Sammani Rajapaksha, Henna Lohi, Sampsa Rauti
Abstract - Electronics is one of the most popular product categories among consumers online. In this paper, we conduct a study on the thirdparty data leaks occurring in the websites of the most online electronics stores used by Finnish residents, as well as the amounts of third parties present at these websites. We studied the leaks by recording and analyzing the network traffic happening from the website while conducting actions at the website that the normal user does when purchasing the product. We also analyze dark patterns found in these websites’ cookie consent banners. Our results show that in 80% of the cases, the product name, product ID and price were leaked to third parties along with the data identifying the user. Almost all of the inspected websites used dark patterns in their cookie consent banners, and privacy policies often had severe deficiencies in informing the user of the extent of data collection.