Third-party services and their usage on the most visited Estonian websites

Abstract

Websites and used business models have changed a lot during the last few decades. While in the past a website had to create, manage, and secure all its own components, now all the site must do is to focus on its very own speciality and, by using third-party services, leave all the infrastructure, visitor analysis and security management to the services that specialize on those exact topics. This allows the website operators to create quality content, save money on development and increase their income. While using third-party services makes the process more efficient for the website operators, it makes the users of those sites more vulnerable. Every piece of possible information about the user is gathered and shared with third-party partners to analyse user’s patterns, location, and possible interests, so that the website can offer specific content to specific user. If we look more into the requests that forward the user’s data, we can see that all of this ends up in the databases of only a handful of big tech companies, which, in turn, creates a handful of problems – big companies having leverage over the site contents, risks related to data centralization, and web dependency on the tech giants. The current thesis will focus on the analysis of the most visited Estonian websites and their usage of third-party services, as well as the final destinations for gathered and forwarded user’s information. Based on the findings, different web business models and third-party services are explained, as well as the connections between them. Data centralization problems are discussed along with recommendations to the end-users for more safer web browsing.