# On the Uniqueness of Web Browsing History Patterns

* Corresponding author
1 PRIVATICS - Privacy Models, Architectures and Tools for the Information Society
Inria Grenoble - Rhône-Alpes, CITI - CITI Centre of Innovation in Telecommunications and Integration of services
Abstract : We present the results of the first large-scale study of the uniqueness of Web browsing histories, gathered from a total of $368,284$ Internet users who visited a history detection demonstration website. Our results show that for a majority of users ($69\%$), the browsing history is unique and that users for whom we could detect at least $4$ visited websites were uniquely identified by their histories in $97\%$ of cases. We observe a significant rate of stability in browser history fingerprints: for repeat visitors, $38\%$ of fingerprints are identical over time, and differing ones were correlated with original history contents, indicating static browsing preferences (for history subvectors of size $50$). We report a striking result that it is enough to test for a small number of pages in order to both enumerate users' interests and perform an efficient and unique behavioral fingerprint; we show that testing $50$ web pages is enough to fingerprint $42\%$ of users in our database, increasing to $70\%$ with $500$ web pages.
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Journal articles

Cited literature [23 references]

https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00917042
Contributor : Lukasz Olejnik <>
Submitted on : Wednesday, December 11, 2013 - 11:06:29 AM
Last modification on : Wednesday, July 8, 2020 - 12:43:26 PM
Long-term archiving on: : Friday, March 14, 2014 - 10:35:51 AM

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### Citation

Lukasz Olejnik, Claude Castelluccia, Artur Janc. On the Uniqueness of Web Browsing History Patterns. Annals of Telecommunications - annales des télécommunications, Springer, 2013, ⟨10.1007/s12243-013-0392-5⟩. ⟨hal-00917042⟩

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