You Can't Trust Your Tag Neither: Privacy Leaks and Potential Legal Violations within the Google Tag Manager

Fuente: arXiv
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Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Mertens, Gilles, Bielova, Nataliia, Roca, Vincent, Santos, Cristiana
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Mertens, Gilles
Bielova, Nataliia
Roca, Vincent
Santos, Cristiana
author_facet Mertens, Gilles
Bielova, Nataliia
Roca, Vincent
Santos, Cristiana
contents Tag Management Systems were developed in order to support website publishers in installing multiple third-party JavaScript scripts (Tags) on their websites. Google developed its own TMS called ``Google Tag Manager'' (GTM) that is currently present on 42\% of the top 1 million most popular websites. However, GTM has not yet been thoroughly evaluated by the academic research community. In this work, we study, for the first time, the Tags provided within the GTM system. We propose a new methodology called ``detecting privacy leaks in isolation'' and apply it to multiple Tags to analyse the types of data that Tags collect and contrast them to the legal and technical documentation, in collaboration with a legal expert. Across three studies - in-depth analysis of 6 Tags, automated analysis of 718 Tags, and analysis of Google ``Consent Mode'' - we discover multiple hidden data leaks, incomplete and diverging declarations, undisclosed third-parties and cookies, personal data sharing without consent and we further identify potential legal violations within EU Data Protection law.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_08806
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle You Can't Trust Your Tag Neither: Privacy Leaks and Potential Legal Violations within the Google Tag Manager
Mertens, Gilles
Bielova, Nataliia
Roca, Vincent
Santos, Cristiana
Cryptography and Security
Tag Management Systems were developed in order to support website publishers in installing multiple third-party JavaScript scripts (Tags) on their websites. Google developed its own TMS called ``Google Tag Manager'' (GTM) that is currently present on 42\% of the top 1 million most popular websites. However, GTM has not yet been thoroughly evaluated by the academic research community. In this work, we study, for the first time, the Tags provided within the GTM system. We propose a new methodology called ``detecting privacy leaks in isolation'' and apply it to multiple Tags to analyse the types of data that Tags collect and contrast them to the legal and technical documentation, in collaboration with a legal expert. Across three studies - in-depth analysis of 6 Tags, automated analysis of 718 Tags, and analysis of Google ``Consent Mode'' - we discover multiple hidden data leaks, incomplete and diverging declarations, undisclosed third-parties and cookies, personal data sharing without consent and we further identify potential legal violations within EU Data Protection law.
title You Can't Trust Your Tag Neither: Privacy Leaks and Potential Legal Violations within the Google Tag Manager
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.08806