Princeton Web Transparency & Accountability Project

Measure Threats

We monitor websites and services to discover companies’ data collection, data use, and deceptive practices. Using our measurement software OpenWPM, we study privacy, security, and ethics of consumer data usage.

Create Change

Our external oversight incentivizes companies to improve privacy and avoid deceptive practices. The data and studies that we produce assist regulators & browser makers in their privacy efforts.

Inform the Public

We translate our research into practical information for public consumption. We aim to improve the accuracy of media reports about online privacy and to provide useful advice for consumers on this website.

Uncovering privacy-infringing practices online

Through numerous studies, we have uncovered the widespread presence of privacy-infringing technologies including a) browser fingerprinting and cookie syncing b) leaks of email addresses to third parties embedded in emails, and c) how session replay scripts collect passwords and sensitive user data. We have released a dataset containing our monthly, automated measurement of tracking and privacy on 1 million sites.

Exposing deceptive and misleading online content

We recently published an automated measurement of dark patterns on the top 11K most popular shopping websites. We revealed widespread use of many deceptive patterns, and patterns that mislead users into making potentially harmful and sub-optimal decisions. In other research, we discovered that most social media influencers do not disclose their advertising relationships with companies to users, running afoul of federal laws.