
Supplementary Artifact Abstract Web tracking is an omnipresent phenomenon in today's web, affecting users in their day-to-day lives. Filter lists and blockers were invented to detect trackers and to protect users. Due to limitations of said tools, researchers developed web tracker detectors to replace them. No review constructed a universal perspective and classification of web tracker detectors until now. Past reviews focused either on the field as a whole or on web tracking techniques. In this SoK paper, we present the most comprehensive study on web tracker detection by systematizing and synthesizing the available knowledge. We conduct a systematic review, resulting in 59 primary and 16 supplementary studies out of a corpus of 832 papers. Based on these findings we suggest a taxonomy, observe and evaluate trends, propose open research gaps, and recommendations with which we aim to lay the foundations for future web tracker detection research. In addition, we conduct a limited reproducibility study to assess the validity of past studies and highlight emerging problems in this field. Repository Structure The repository is organized to mirror the methodological workflow of the SoK paper. At a high level, the repository contains directories and files corresponding to the major phases of our methodology. These materials may include the study corpus, screening and eligibility records, data extraction sheets, coding and classification resources, taxonomy artifacts, figures, and supplementary notes. Together, they document how the evidence base was constructed. Excel ProcessorAfter exporting all the results from the digital libraries to excel sheets, werun a simple deduplication script to remove duplicated entries. FiguresHere are all the final figures used in our SoK paper. List of artifactsHere is an excel sheet that contains links to the available artifacts (code and datasets)of the primary studies that have been examined in the SoK paper. Note that ourlimited reproducibility experiments (as stated in Section 8) only used the originalartifacts from the authors and only if they were functional. These artifacts are notincluded here with our artifact, but links can be found in the excel sheet. We only conducted the original experiments for the best performing model that were defined by the authors in their repositories, i.e., we did not create new experiments, datasets, or code. The computed scores can be found in Section 8. Lit Review ResultsThis directory is structured according to the phases of our methodology (see image in figures folder, SoK Review Figure). - **lit_review_results/1-identification_phase** contains the raw data, i.e., the exportsfrom the digital libraries and the compiled review_reports that were then used bythe reviewers. - **lit_review_results/2-screening_phase** contains the excel sheets from bothreviewer A and B and a summary of their decisions and the final decision. PETS paper crawlerA simple crawler can be found here, one for results from 2025 and one for before. In addition, a script to execute the pre-defined search string. Security/Privacy Issues and Ethical Concerns This artifact accompanies our SoK paper and primarily consists of documentation and analysis materials. The artifact does not contain exploits, malware samples, vulnerable software, or code that disables or modifies security mechanisms on theevaluator’s system. As such, evaluating or inspecting the artifact does not require elevated privileges, modification of operating system protections, or interaction with potentially harmful binaries. From a privacy perspective, the artifact does not contain personal data, user tracking data, or datasets derived from human subjects. The materials are based exclusively on publicly available academic publications and publicly accessible documentation of web tracking detection techniques. Consequently, no identifiable information about individuals is collected, processed, or distributed as part of this artifact. All in all, we are not aware of any security, privacy, or ethical risks associated with inspecting or reusing the materials provided in this artifact beyond the standard considerations involved in handling research data and documentation.
| 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). | 0 | |
| 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. | Average | |
| influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | Average | |
| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Average |
