Number of Tracking Cookies a Website Uses (1st & 3rd Parties)

Analysis
1

Hello,
I’m a PhD student in Marketing trying to figure out weather the enforcement of the GDPR had an impact on the number of tracking cookies companies are using on their website.
It is possible to retrieve this kind of longitudinal information from the HttpArchive? Is it also possible to figure out who is benefiting from the tracking cookie (the company itself or a third-party company)?

Unfortunately I’m not a computer scientist so I’ve tried my best to look at the BigQuery database but it is not totally clear to me the meaning of the different columns present in the different tables. Is there some documentation about them?

Thank you so much for the help!
Caterina

2

Hello Caterina,

Check this paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3560392

They are doing that already and have shared the code for replicating their dataset.

Also they are going to present their paper here: http://conference.nber.org/sched/SI20prit

Hope it helps,
miguel

3

Hi Miguel,
I’ve already read and carefully inspected the paper you mentioned (thank you anyway!). However, I’d like to be able to play around with the database by myself since I think there are numerous information helpful for my research. Is it possible to set up an online meeting or have some online help on the different features present in the database?
For example, is it possible to use a pre-existing list of websites and check how many of these have tracking cookies? the code present in the research is surely usable but I think I may need additional information.
Best
Caterina

4

Best thing is for you to contact Christian Peukert (one of the authors). He is really approachable. You can tell him I directed you to him.

5

Perfect! Thank you so much Miguel for helping me to identify who to contact.
Thanks again
Best
Caterina