2,365 research outputs found
An Automated Approach to Auditing Disclosure of Third-Party Data Collection in Website Privacy Policies
A dominant regulatory model for web privacy is "notice and choice". In this
model, users are notified of data collection and provided with options to
control it. To examine the efficacy of this approach, this study presents the
first large-scale audit of disclosure of third-party data collection in website
privacy policies. Data flows on one million websites are analyzed and over
200,000 websites' privacy policies are audited to determine if users are
notified of the names of the companies which collect their data. Policies from
25 prominent third-party data collectors are also examined to provide deeper
insights into the totality of the policy environment. Policies are additionally
audited to determine if the choice expressed by the "Do Not Track" browser
setting is respected.
Third-party data collection is wide-spread, but fewer than 15% of attributed
data flows are disclosed. The third-parties most likely to be disclosed are
those with consumer services users may be aware of, those without consumer
services are less likely to be mentioned. Policies are difficult to understand
and the average time requirement to read both a given site{\guillemotright}s
policy and the associated third-party policies exceeds 84 minutes. Only 7% of
first-party site policies mention the Do Not Track signal, and the majority of
such mentions are to specify that the signal is ignored. Among third-party
policies examined, none offer unqualified support for the Do Not Track signal.
Findings indicate that current implementations of "notice and choice" fail to
provide notice or respect choice
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Take Me Out: Space and Place in Library Interactions
Information interactions are strongly affected by the place where they occur. Specific locations are ofen associated with searches on particular topics, and individual users perform different tasks in habituated places. A classic example of habituated space is the commuter who regularly reads the news on the train. This paper investigates these associations through four user studies that examine different uses of place in information interaction. Through this, we reveal the ways in which the location of information interactions makes them effective or ineffective. This extends our interpretation of the role of place in information interaction beyond established foci such as location-based search
Opportunities and Challenges Around a Tool for Social and Public Web Activity Tracking
While the web contains many social websites, people are generally left in the dark about the activities of other people traversing the web as a whole. In this paper, we explore the potential benefits and privacy considerations around generating a real-time, publicly accessible stream of web activity where users can publish chosen parts of their web browsing data. Taking inspiration from social media systems, we describe individual benefits that can be unlocked by such sharing and that may incentivize users to publish aspects of their browsing. We ask whether and how these benefits outweigh potential costs in lost privacy. We conduct our study of public web activity sharing through scenario-based interviews and a field deployment of a tool for web activity sharing
The Value of User-Visible Internet Cryptography
Cryptographic mechanisms are used in a wide range of applications, including
email clients, web browsers, document and asset management systems, where
typical users are not cryptography experts. A number of empirical studies have
demonstrated that explicit, user-visible cryptographic mechanisms are not
widely used by non-expert users, and as a result arguments have been made that
cryptographic mechanisms need to be better hidden or embedded in end-user
processes and tools. Other mechanisms, such as HTTPS, have cryptography
built-in and only become visible to the user when a dialogue appears due to a
(potential) problem. This paper surveys deployed and potential technologies in
use, examines the social and legal context of broad classes of users, and from
there, assesses the value and issues for those users
A comparative forensic analysis of privacy enhanced web browsers
Growing concerns regarding Internet privacy has led to the development of enhanced privacy web browsers. The intent of these web browsers is to provide better privacy for users who share a computer by not storing information about what websites are being visited as well as protecting user data from websites that employ tracking tools such as Google for advertisement purposes. As with most tools, users have found an alternative purpose for enhanced privacy browsers, some illegal in nature. This research conducted a digital forensic examination of three enhanced privacy web browsers and three commonly used web browsers in private browsing mode to identify if these browsers produced residual browsers artifacts and if so, if those artifacts provided content about the browsing session. The examination process, designed to simulate common practice of law enforcement digital forensic investigations, found that when comparing browser type by browser and tool combination, out of a possible 60 artifacts, the common web browsers produced 26 artifacts while the enhanced privacy browsers produced 25 for a difference of 2\%. The tool set used also had an impact in this study, with FTK finding a total of 28 artifacts while Autopsy found 23, for a difference of 8\%. The conclusion of this research found that although there was a difference in the number of artifacts produced by the two groups of browsers, the difference was not significant to support the claim that one group of browsers produced fewer browsers than the other. As this study has implications for privacy minded citizens as well as law enforcement and digital forensic practitioners concerned with browser forensics, this study identified a need for future research with respect to internet browser privacy, including expanding this research to include more browsers and tools
The practical politics of sharing personal data
The focus of this paper is upon how people handle the sharing of personal data as an interactional concern. A number of ethnographic studies of domestic environments are drawn upon in order to articulate a range of circumstances under which data may be shared. In particular a distinction is made between the in situ sharing of data with others around you and the sharing of data with remote parties online. A distinction is also drawn between circumstances of purposefully sharing data in some way and circumstances where the sharing of data is incidental or even unwitting. On the basis of these studies a number of the organisational features of how people seek to manage the ways in which their data is shared are teased out. The paper then reflects upon how data sharing practices have evolved to handle the increasing presence of digital systems in people’s environments and how these relate to the ways in which people traditionally orient to the sharing of information. In conclusion a number of ways are pointed out in which the sharing of data remains problematic and there is a discussion of how systems may need to adapt to better support people’s data sharing practices in the future
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Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL
Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N
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