Measuring privacy loss and the impact of privacy protection in web browsing

Abstract

Various bits of information about users accessing Web sites. some of which are private, have been gathered since the inception of the Web. Increasingly the gathering, aggregation, and processing has been outsourced to third parties. The goal of this work is to examine the effectiveness of specific techniques to limit this diffusion of private information to third parties. We also examine the impact of these privacy protection techniques on the usability and quality of the Web pages returned. Using objective measures for privacy protection and page quality we examine their tradeoffs for different privacy protection techniques applied to a collection of popular Web sites as well as a focused set of sites with significant privacy concerns. We study privacy protection both at a browser and at a proxy.