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Towards a Privacy Web Scanner for End-Users

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Security in Computing and Communications (SSCC 2019)

Abstract

Internet users progressively have realized that due to our online activities our privacy can be compromised and that much personal information can be gathered. To cope with this problem, both technological solutions and regulations have emerged which are steadily being improved. But, apart from these privacy-preserving tools, we need tools to show privacy risks and that end-users be aware the risks they might be exposed to when they access a website. Currently, there are some tools of this kind. However, they are not oriented to end-users (users with not a high/moderate knowledge on technical issues related to tracking). To address this issue, we have started the development of a Web scanner, named Privacy Web Scanner, that is, in charge of analyzing a website and provide in a simple and graphical way the privacy implications of accessing that site for end-users. In the paper, we present the main issues that should be considered in this kind of scanner, its design and the features of the current beta version.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://urlscan.io.

  2. 2.

    https://webbkoll.dataskydd.net/.

  3. 3.

    https://webcookies.org/.

  4. 4.

    https://privacyscore.org/.

  5. 5.

    ChromeDriver, http://chromedriver.chromium.org/.

  6. 6.

    https://policies.google.com/technologies/types.

  7. 7.

    https://cookiepedia.co.uk/.

  8. 8.

    https://www.primefaces.org/.

  9. 9.

    https://www.bootsfaces.net/.

  10. 10.

    https://jsoup.org/.

  11. 11.

    https://www.seleniumhq.org/projects/webdriver.

  12. 12.

    https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/wiki/ChromeDriver, http://chromedriver.chromium.org/.

  13. 13.

    https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/htmlunit-driver.

  14. 14.

    Google Gson, https://github.com/google/gson.

  15. 15.

    https://developers.facebook.com/docs/javascript/quickstart/.

  16. 16.

    https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-for-websites/javascript-api/guides/set-up-twitter-for-websites.html.

  17. 17.

    https://developers.pinterest.com/docs/sdks/js/.

  18. 18.

    https://www.nycgo.com.

  19. 19.

    https://requirejs.org.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the PERSEIDES (contract TIN2017-86885-R), Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, grant number RTI2018-095855-B-I00, and European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 786725 (OLYMPUS project).

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Correspondence to Antonio Ruiz-Martínez .

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Massardier-Meca, M., Ruiz-Martínez, A. (2020). Towards a Privacy Web Scanner for End-Users. In: Thampi, S., Martinez Perez, G., Ko, R., Rawat, D. (eds) Security in Computing and Communications. SSCC 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1208. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4825-3_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4825-3_14

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  • Print ISBN: 978-981-15-4824-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-15-4825-3

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