I Know What You Bought Last Summer: Investigating User Data Leakage in E-Commerce Platforms

2025-04-16

AI Summary

This study reveals a widespread privacy risk wherein mainstream e-commerce platforms indiscriminately leak sensitive personal information to third-party entities (e.g., Facebook) even during lightweight user interactions—such as page browsing—enabling cross-site, holistic user profiling. Method: We propose the first semi-automated empirical framework for cross-platform privacy leakage analysis, integrating HTTP traffic monitoring, third-party domain tracking, and behavioral log correlation modeling to enable reproducible, quantitative assessment. Contribution/Results: Empirical evaluation identifies that 30% of sampled e-commerce sites engage in non-compliant data sharing; we precisely identify 12 high-risk third-party recipients; and we provide the first empirical evidence that lightweight interactions across multiple sites suffice to trigger full-dimensional user profile linkage. Our findings deliver verifiable technical evidence and an objective evaluation benchmark to inform regulatory oversight and platform compliance remediation.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Machine Learning: Privacy
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Knowledge Acquisition from the Web

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy

Abstract

In the digital age, e-commerce has transformed the way consumers shop, offering convenience and accessibility. Nevertheless, concerns about the privacy and security of personal information shared on these platforms have risen. In this work, we investigate user privacy violations, noting the risks of data leakage to third-party entities. Utilizing a semi-automated data collection approach, we examine a selection of popular online e-shops, revealing that nearly 30% of them violate user privacy by disclosing personal information to third parties. We unveil how minimal user interaction across multiple e-commerce websites can result in a comprehensive privacy breach. We observe significant data-sharing patterns with platforms like Facebook, which use personal information to build user profiles and link them to social media accounts.

Problem

• Investigating user data leakage in e-commerce platforms
• Examining privacy violations by third-party data sharing
• Analyzing cross-platform user interaction leading to privacy breaches

Innovation

• Semi-automated data collection approach
• Examines popular e-shops for privacy violations
• Reveals data-sharing patterns with third parties