Supplementary Artifact

Abstract

Web tracking is an omnipresent phenomenon in today's web, affecting users in their day-to-day lives. Filter lists and blockers were invented to detect trackers and to protect users. Due to limitations of said tools, researchers developed web tracker detectors to replace them. 
No review constructed a universal perspective and classification of web tracker detectors until now. Past reviews focused either on the field as a whole or on web tracking techniques. In this SoK paper, we present the most comprehensive study on web tracker detection by systematizing and synthesizing the available knowledge. We conduct a systematic review, resulting in 59 primary and 16 supplementary studies out of a corpus of 832 papers. Based on these findings we suggest a taxonomy, observe and evaluate trends, propose open research gaps, and recommendations with which we aim to lay the foundations for future web tracker detection research. In addition, we conduct a limited reproducibility study to assess the validity of past studies and highlight emerging problems in this field.

Repository Structure

The repository is organized to mirror the methodological workflow of the SoK paper. 
At a high level, the repository contains directories and files corresponding to the 
major phases of our methodology. These materials may include the study corpus, screening 
and eligibility records, data extraction sheets, coding and classification resources, 
taxonomy artifacts, figures, and supplementary notes. Together, they 
document how the evidence base was constructed. 

Excel Processor
After exporting all the results from the digital libraries to excel sheets, we
run a simple deduplication script to remove duplicated entries. 

Figures
Here are all the final figures used in our SoK paper. 

List of artifacts
Here is an excel sheet that contains links to the available artifacts (code and datasets)
of the primary studies that have been examined in the SoK paper. Note that our
limited reproducibility experiments (as stated in Section 8) only used the original
artifacts from the authors and only if they were functional. These artifacts are not
included here with our artifact, but links can be found in the excel sheet. 
We only conducted the original experiments for the best performing model that 
were defined by the authors in their repositories, i.e., we did not create new 
experiments, datasets, or code. The computed scores can be found in Section 8.  

Lit Review Results
This directory is structured according to the phases of our methodology (see 
image in figures folder, SoK Review Figure).

- **lit_review_results/1-identification_phase** contains the raw data, i.e., the exports
from the digital libraries and the compiled review_reports that were then used by
the reviewers.

- **lit_review_results/2-screening_phase** contains the excel sheets from both
reviewer A and B and a summary of their decisions and the final decision. 

PETS paper crawler
A simple crawler can be found here, one for results from 2025 and one for before. 
In addition, a script to execute the pre-defined search string. 

Security/Privacy Issues and Ethical Concerns 

This artifact accompanies our SoK paper and primarily consists of documentation 
and analysis materials. The artifact does not contain exploits, malware samples, 
vulnerable software, or code that disables or modifies security mechanisms on the
evaluator’s system. As such, evaluating or inspecting the artifact does not 
require elevated privileges, modification of operating system protections, 
or interaction with potentially harmful binaries.

From a privacy perspective, the artifact does not contain personal data, user 
tracking data, or datasets derived from human subjects. The materials are based 
exclusively on publicly available academic publications and publicly accessible 
documentation of web tracking detection techniques. Consequently, no identifiable 
information about individuals is collected, processed, or distributed as part of 
this artifact.

All in all, we are not aware of any security, privacy, or ethical risks associated with 
inspecting or reusing the materials provided in this artifact beyond the standard 
considerations involved in handling research data and documentation.