Can Browser Add-Ons Protect Your Children from Online Tracking?

Online tracking of children by third-parties is strictly regulated by law in many regions of the world (e.g., COPPA in USA and GDPR in EU), and in a large number of situations constitutes criminal activity. Unfortunately, the existence of these laws does not seem to be an effective deterrence. In this paper, we provide a brief summary of our findings pertaining to the effectiveness of four popular browser add-ons in protecting against third-party tracking on a select number of children-oriented Web-sites. The obtain results show that protection from tracking by a browser add-on is generally achieved at the expense of Web-page performance. In other words, add-ons that are effective at blocking third-party trackers will often adversely affect the normal functioning of the visited Web-page(s). In addition, our results also show that when it comes to user/children tracking by well-known 'tech giants', all four add-ons are likely to provide only limited protection.