Tracking the Trackers: Structural Evolution of Web-Tracking on Educational Websites

ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci), pp. 392–397

Abstract

Online tracking has become a core mechanism for collecting behavioural data across the web, influencing advertising, analytics, and content delivery. While these practices are well documented on commercial platforms, educational websites remain critically understudied, even though they serve minors and young adults, and are often perceived as safer, low-risk environments. In this work, we conduct a thirteen-year longitudinal study (2013–2025) of third-party tracking on educational websites using a dataset of over 21k manually labeled sites across 14 categories. We collect historical snapshots from the Wayback Machine and extract all tracking domains and third-party services to examine long-term trends. We analyze tracker growth, category-level differences, the evolution of distinct tracker functions, and centralization and structural changes in co-occurrence tracker networks. Our results show a substantial rise in tracking activity, increasing centralization, persistent structural reshaping, and faster user exposure to dominant third parties, raising ongoing concerns for learner privacy.

Authors 4

1. Akrati Saxena Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands

2. Arun Kumar Singh

   Indian Institute of Technology BHU

   Affiliation as printed

   IIT BHU, Varanasi, India

3. Harsh Saxena

   Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani

   Affiliation as printed

   Bits Pilani, India, Pilani, India

4. Rasmus Helles

   University of Copenhagen

   Affiliation as printed

   University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark