Effective Techniques for Protecting the Privacy of Web Users

Abstract

With the rapid growth of web networks, the security and privacy of online users are becoming more compromised. Especially, the use of third-party services to track users’ activities and improve website performance. Therefore, it is unavoidable that using personal information to create unique profiles may violate individuals’ privacy. Recently, several tools have been developed such as anonymity, anti-tracking, and browser plugins to ensure the protection of users from third-party tracking methods by blocking JavaScript programs and other website components. However, the current state lacks an efficient approach that provides a comprehensive solution. In this paper, we conducted a systematic analysis of the most common privacy protection tools based on their accuracy and performance by evaluating their effectiveness in correctly classifying tracking and functional JavaScript programs, then evaluating the estimated time the browser takes to render the pages for each tool. To achieve this, we automatically browsed the most 50 websites determined in 2022 and categorized them according to different fields to get the in-page (as part of HTML script tags), and all external JavaScript programs. Then we collected data and datasets of 1578 JavaScript elements and obtained six diverse Firefox profiles when the tools were enabled. The results found that Ghostery has the highest percentage of allowing most functioning scripts with the lowest average error rate (AER). While at the same time NoScript achieved the highest percentage of blocking most tracking scripts since it is the highest blocker of third-party services. After that, we examined the speed of the browser finding that, Ghostery improved the load time by 36.2% faster than the baseline, while Privacy Badger only reduced the load time by 7.1%. We believe that our findings can help users decide on a privacy tool that meets their needs. Moreover, researchers and developers can use our findings to improve the privacy of internet users by designing more effective privacy protection techniques.