TrackCheck

This app tests whether your device can be recognized be web user tracking libraries.

Tracking a web user describes the activity of collecting descriptive attributes of the user's device to create an identifier linked to this device. This identifier is used to recognize the specific device on other websites or at a later visit. Such tracking techniques are widely used by ad networks to show personalized ads on different websites. As a general rule: The more unique your mobile's attributes are the more trackable are you.

Previous work has shown that information provided only by the web browser is sufficient for tracking a web user when using a desktop computer while it is harder to distinguish mobile devices. This is why we do this study. We aim to learn descriptive attributes of mobile devices that could be used for tracking web users and what a user can do to prevent unrequested tracking. Therefore we need a high diversity of data from many different smartphones and other mobile devices.

Your data helps us studying the trackability of mobile devices. When participating in out test, your mobile device provides data that any website could acquire. No special permissions or apps are necessary. We gather detailled data about your browser but also test the accessability of mobile specific resources like gyroscope or display size.

This data is absolutely anonymouos and yields no personal information about you! We analyze this data for research only! It will neither be sold or distributed to third parties nor used for any other than the declared purpose!