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Research Journey

At the moment, this page is WiP and only relevant to automated measurements. Maybe we have to create the same page for manual studies (I am not covering them at the wiki at all now). The plan is that each point links to some page.

Note that some aspects can repeat in multiple steps of the research journey

Pilot study and topic exploration
- Manual exploration (existing inspection tools)
- Literature review
- Study preregistration
- Ethics approval
Development
- Crawling technologies
  - OpenWPM
  - Tracker Radar Collector
  - Custom crawler
- Interacting with websites
  - Stateful and stateless crawling
  - Techniques for automated interaction
  - Granting consent to websites
  - Registration and login to websites
- Data collection for privacy and security tasks
  - Instrumentation of requests, cookies, JavaScript calls
  - Collection of emails and other messages
- Multilingual support
- Supporting specific platforms (Facebook, TikTok, Amazon, etc.)
Execution of experiment, deployment
- Websites selection
- Crawling location (VPNs, proxies)
- Crawling using archival data
- Deployment issues
  - Executing long experiments
  - Monitoring experiments
Processing results
- Classification of privacy and security issues
  - Classifying requests
  - Classifying cookies
  - Classifying fingerprinting
  - Classifying JavaScript code
  - Classifying Dark patterns
  - Classifying emails and other messages
- Website classification
- Statistics
Submission
- Conferences
- Writing tips, literature review
- Artifacts
- Rebuttals (external recommendations by Ankit Singla and Matt Might)
After publication
- Notifying websites (disclosure)
- Enforcement: Working with regulatory authorities
- Public relations
Other research practices
- PhD and research advice

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