When browsing leaves footprints: automatically detect privacy violations

Abstract

Web sites use a number of different techniques to gather information about the behavior and interests of their visitors. In many cases this collection happens without the knowledge of the visitors and is continued across different domains in the world wide web. This allows organizations to gain a huge amount of personal information about users. We present a tool named PRIVIDOR (PRIvacy VIolation DetectOR) that allows to detect potential privacy violations on web sites and create reports containing its findings. The design goal of PRIVIDOR is to integrate as many as possible evaluations into one server based tool. The tool helps to evaluate the web sites policies concerning the handling of their visitors privacy.