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ACM Transactions on the Web
Article . 2026 . Peer-reviewed
Data sources: Crossref
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Gotta Catch ’em all: On the Web Tracking Practices of a Deal-Sharing Conglomerate and their Heavy Reliance on Redirect Chain

Authors: Roux, Sterenn; Pélissier, Samuel; Bourcier, Johann; Rudametkin, Walter; Laperdrix, Pierre; Mehanna, Naif;

Gotta Catch ’em all: On the Web Tracking Practices of a Deal-Sharing Conglomerate and their Heavy Reliance on Redirect Chain

Abstract

Affiliate marketing is a growing performance-based marketing arrangement in which affiliates are rewarded for getting users to register, purchase, or visit a shopping website [ 16 , 38 ]. This marketing strategy is valued at $18.5 billion USD for 2025 [ 31 , 67 ]. Deal-sharing platforms take advantage of this marketing strategy by acting as storefronts for sellers that showcase promotions and deals. As the service is free to use, they earn commissions through affiliate links [ 36 ] when they lead to sales. We perform an in-depth, end-to-end study of the tracking techniques leveraged by Pepper [ 1 ] and its extended environment, a key player in deal-sharing platforms. Through a systematic 1-month crawl, we analyze the tracking ecosystem of 10 deal-sharing websites active in a diverse range of countries abiding by different privacy laws. Our analysis reveals that a significant part of the tracking occurs during redirect chains [ 40 ] between the deal-sharing platform and the shopping website. We quantify the tracking-specific use of cookies, CNAME cloaking [ 14 ], and link decorations [ 52 , 58 ] within redirect chains. We find that 67.9% of redirect chains leverage at least one of these additional tracking techniques. We show that redirect chains examined in prior work (limited to HTTP-based redirects) are significantly more constrained than those observed in our study (HTTP-, HTML-, and JS-based), which enable more aggressive behavior by dynamically loading additional tracking resources at runtime. Finally, by analyzing the ecosystem of third-party services and the privacy policies of deal-sharing websites, we reveal the omission of numerous actors involved in redirect chains.

Country
France
Keywords

Web privacy, Security and privacy→Economics of security and privacy, Information systems →Online advertising, Online advertising, [INFO] Computer Science [cs], Redirect chains

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selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
0
Average
Average
Average
Green