What are the unique IDs in the dataset?

[birdsarah]

Develop a function for pulling out unique ids from the dataset.

We want to identify scripts that have stored / created unique ids. We also want to identify scripts that have not been storing / creating unique ids.

[birdsarah]

https://www.ghostery.com/lp/study/ published a way to detect unique IDs, also discussed in https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.08959.pdf. What is their technique and can it be used.

[ayushi1998]

Hey

I would like to work on this. I will create a python script for detecting the same using the papers you have posted in the comment.
Kindly guide me with the CSV files I need to look at and what all source code is needed to start with it, if required.

[birdsarah]

Great! Just to re-emphasize this is not a one issue per person repo. All the questions are very open ended and different people may find very different and complementary things when looking at a question.

[birdsarah]

@ayushi1998 - feel free to hop in gitter for support questions. Please carefully read the home page of the repo to get started. You can also try running the hello_*.ipynb in analyses to get started. Once you have got started I would encourage you to contribute extra information wherever you tried looking for it but felt you couldn't find it.

[muskankhedia]

Hi @birdsarah,

I have been through all the parameters in the dataset and I think none of the parameter act as a unique id. Instead of looking for such a unique id parameter, we can assign a unique id to every distinct scipt_url and store in the dataset accordingly by creating a new column.

If you have some different thoughts or ideas regarding any parameter acting as a unique_id in any way. Pls, share it. It would be helpful to me for further analysis of data.

[birdsarah]

@muskankhedia I think you are misunderstanding the nature of this issue.

We want to look at calls, probably to storage APIs, to discover scripts that have been setting unique ids.

The creation of unique IDs is a symptom of fingerprinting. That does not mean that the storage of Unique IDs means that fingerprinting definitively has occurred. It also does not mean that if we do not detect a unique ID being stored that fingerprinting did not occur. But it is a piece of evidence we can use to build a picture of what a script is doing.

There are a number of routes for storage that we may have captured e.g. window.localStorage, window.storage, window.document.cookie, ....

An example of a value that's commonly set that is not a unique ID is modernizr.

[noahwalugembe]

Can i also work on this

[birdsarah]

As already mentioned on this issue @noahwalugembe. There are no assigned issues. Everyone is free to work on any research question. There are many possible analyses for a given research question. You are welcome to work on this question.