Global Web, Local Privacy? An International Review of Web Tracking

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 18 Apr 2026] Global Web, Local Privacy? An International Review of Web Tracking Harry Yu, Patton Yin, Sebastian Zimmeck Web tracking by ad networks, social networks, and other third parties is privacy-invasive. To protect users' privacy an increasing number of countries are adopting new privacy laws. However, a major reason why their application on the web is so challenging is that privacy laws are local while the web is global. To that end, we evaluate websites' tracker connections for ten countries for two sets of sites -- the global Common Top 525 and the Country-specific Top 525 sites. We find that Australia and the US (California) -- two of the three opt-out jurisdictions in our study -- have the highest level of web tracking while opt-in jurisdictions generally have lower levels. We also find that the Common Top 525 sites have 50.5\% fewer average tracker connections when accessed from EU countries compared to non-EU countries. Further, simply not interacting with cookie banners decreases trackers by 48.5\% for Germany, as measured for a sample of 36 Common Top 525 sites. These results suggest that the General Data Protection Regulation and the ePrivacy Directive have a tangible effect in reducing tracking. As 28\% of Common Top 525 sites show cookie banners in all ten countries, our results suggest a moderate Brussels effect. However, against the backdrop of global US ad tech practices, EU law primarily acts as a Brussels shield. Generally, we think that strong enforcement of privacy laws is key to increase user privacy on the web. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computers and Society (cs.CY) Cite as: arXiv:2604.18633 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.18633v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.18633 Focus to learn more Journal reference: Pragmatic Cybersecurity 2026, 1(1), 5 Submission history From: Sebastian Zimmeck [view email] [v1] Sat, 18 Apr 2026 19:12:47 UTC (4,039 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.CY References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)