Review of Cookie Synchronization Detection Methods

Abstract

The research community has deemed cookie synchronization detection an inherently challenging task. Studies aiming to identify cookie synchronizations often share high-level design choices, but deviate amongst low-level implementations. For example, the majority of studies label a cookie synchronization iff a user identifier is shared with a third party; however, there is a lack of consistency among implementations, such as party relations or identifier value definitions, or whether such definitions are even included. This review intends to provide a record of established methods and promote standardization of methods choice in future work.