TY  - CHAP
A1  - Bender, Benedict
A1  - Fabian, Benjamin
A1  - Lessmann, Stefan
A1  - Haupt, Johannes
T1  - E-Mail Tracking
BT  - status quo and novel countermeasures
T2  - Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS)
N2  - E-mail advertisement, as one instrument in the marketing mix, allows companies to collect fine-grained behavioural data about individual users’ e-mail reading habits realised through sophisticated tracking mechanisms. Such tracking can be harmful for user privacy and security. This problem is especially severe since e-mail tracking techniques gather data without user consent. Striving to increase privacy and security in e-mail communication, the paper makes three contributions. First, a large database of newsletter e-mails is developed. This data facilitates investigating the prevalence of e- mail tracking among 300 global enterprises from Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. Second, countermeasures are developed for automatically identifying and blocking e-mail tracking mechanisms without impeding the user experience. The approach consists of identifying important tracking descriptors and creating a neural network-based detection model. Last, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is established by means of empirical experimentation. The results suggest a classification accuracy of 99.99%.
KW  - E-Mail Tracking
KW  - Countermeasures
KW  - Privacy
KW  - Security
KW  - Machine Learning
Y1  - 2016
UR  - https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2016/ISSecurity/Presentations/13/
ER  -