Doctorant (F/H) doct2024-privatics Web Tracking - Sophia Antipolis, France - Inria

Inria

Entreprise vérifiée

Sophia Antipolis, France

il y a 1 semaine

Posté par:

Sophie Dupont

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Description

Type de contrat :

CDD

Niveau de diplôme exigé :
Bac + 5 ou équivalent

Fonction :
Doctorant

A propos du centre ou de la direction fonctionnelle:
Le centre Inria d'Université Côte d'Azur comprend 37 équipes de recherche et 8 services d'appui.

Le personnel du centre (environ 500 personnes) est composé de scientifiques de différentes nationalités, d'ingénieurs, de techniciens et de personnel administratif.

Les équipes sont principalement localisées sur les campus universitaires de Sophia Antipolis et de Nice ainsi qu'à Montpellier, en étroite collaboration avec les laboratoires et établissements de recherche et d'enseignement supérieur (Université Côte d'Azur, CNRS, INRAE, INSERM...), mais aussi avec les acteurs économiques régionaux.

Présent dans les domaines des neurosciences et de la biologie computationnelles, de la science des données et de la modélisation, du génie logiciel et de la certification, ainsi que de la robotique collaborative, le Centre Inria d'Université Côte d'Azur est un acteur majeur de l'excellence scientifique par ses résultats et ses collaborations au niveau européen et international.

Contexte et atouts du poste:

This position is funded directly by Inria and will be hosted at Inria Centre at Université Côte d'Azur within the PRIVATICS team.

The position will be advised by Nataliia Bielova and co-advised by Frederic Marty and Simone Vannuccini from the Groupe de Recherche en Droit, Economie, Gestion (GREDEG).

The PRIVATICS team applies an interdisciplinary approach to privacy combining technical investigations with economic and legal compliance auditing.

Nataliia Bielova's research aims at automatic compliance auditing of websites, detecting Web tracking technologies on thousands of websites and analysing cookie banners from both technical and legal perspectives.

She has been focusing on the compliance of websites with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and is a former member of the French Data Protection Authority (CNIL).

GREDEG is a mixed research unit (UMR) of the CNRS and the Université Côte d'Azur. Its researchers work in the fields of law, economics, management, and sociology.

Within the UMR, the work of Frédéric Marty and Simone Vannuccini focuses on the economy of the digital sector from an Industrial Organization perspective.

Simone Vannuccini works on innovation, industrial trajectories and artificial intelligence, and Frédéric Marty expertise is on competition issues in the digital sector from a competition law and economics perspective.

Frédéric Marty is also a former Member of the College of the French Competition Authority (Autorité de la Concurrence).

Mission confiée:

Today's websites continuously track users and collect their data for various purposes.

Web tracking ecosystem is currently adapting to the new rules:

Google has started to deprecate third-party cookies since early 2024, while other browser vendors (Safari, Firefox, Brave) already have built-in tracking protection.

However, website publishers do not implement such web tracking themselves:
Tag managers (such as Google Tag Manager) propose publishers an easy integration of tracking functionality into the websites.

Therefore, the information about users' browsing history is in hands of a few companies that pose significant risks on users' privacy.

The research theme for the PhD will aim at the use of large-scale crawling to detect advanced Web tracking technologies in websites and identify the major tag management and tracking companies.

The results will be analysed from the economic perspectives to evaluate the prevalence and market power of companies that deploy and facilitate Web tracking and compliance of these practices with the EU competition law.

The functioning of tags and Google's role in tag management tools may raise a number of competition concerns.

First, Google's position in relation to publishers may give it a decisive informational advantage in that it can benefit from an overall view of the activity of all the users of its services whereas each of them, in isolation, can only access data related to its own activity through Google.

The issue is therefore whether the company is in a position to abuse its dominant position through an exploitation abuse.

Secondly, the owner of the tag manager, in this case Google, has a decisive informational advantage over user companies and may be in a position to implement self-preferencing strategies, i.e.

to manipulate the results provided to its advantage. Equivalent practices were already sanctioned by the European Commission.

It is therefore necessary to identify the possible presence of these strategies on this specific digital market, which is all the more decisive in that it is linked to the online advertising sector, which is the focus of much interest from the competition authorities and may violate the competition laws in the EU.

While the advertising market has been