Title :
Analyzing the Effectiveness of Privacy Related Add-Ons Employed to Thwart Web Based Tracking
Author :
Matthew Ruffell;Jin B. Hong;Dong Seong Kim
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Sci. &
Abstract :
With the rise in popularity of using websites to distribute content to users, content creators needed to gain revenue from page views. To achieve this, they use third-party networks to distribute advertisements and perform analytics on users to customize their advertisements. These networks build up a profile of their users (e.g., navigation patterns, visit frequency, personal interest), which poses a significant privacy risk as this information can be sold to others or used in targeted advertising. In order for users to protect themselves, they need to install add-ons for their web browser which removes third-party content. This paper surveys some of the existing add-ons to block third-party content, and determine which add-ons are required to provide adequate protection. Further analytics are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of those add-ons through the experiments.
Keywords :
"Browsers","Privacy","Advertising","Target tracking","Navigation","Uniform resource locators","HTML"
Conference_Titel :
Dependable Computing (PRDC), 2015 IEEE 21st Pacific Rim International Symposium on
DOI :
10.1109/PRDC.2015.29