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PrivacySafer: Privacy Adaptation for HTML5 Web Applications

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Book cover Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2017 (WISE 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10570))

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Abstract

Privacy protection is necessary in many applications in mobile and stationary environments. The advances in web applications with the introduction of HTML5 provide the possibility for cross-platform application support. Access to sensitive information is feasible via various means from such applications in order to provide a personalized user experience. Mechanisms to allow users to control this access are vital for a better web experience. In this work, we present our approach toward a mechanism for privacy protection in HTML5 web environments. User preferences for privacy policies can be specified via an indicated notation that considers contextual parameters. Preferences are taken into account during the execution adapting the application content. Our PrivacySafer approach is supported by implementations of extensions in two popular web browsers, Chrome and Firefox. An evaluation on the efficiency of the approach and the resulting web experience with a small group of users has been performed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.truste.com/resources/harris-mobile-survey/.

  2. 2.

    http://www.adotas.com/2014/08/with-incentives-nearly-a-third-of-consumers-would-allow-brands-to-track-mobile-locations.

  3. 3.

    http://www.cs.ucy.ac.cy/~gkapi/privacy.html.

  4. 4.

    http://privacysafer.cs.ucy.ac.cy/.

  5. 5.

    https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2710225?hl=en.

  6. 6.

    https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=520765.

  7. 7.

    http://ctrlq.org/maps/where/, https://mycurrentlocation.net/, https://www.where-am-i.net/.

  8. 8.

    http://wellcaffeinated.net/demos/device-orientation.

  9. 9.

    http://demo.hongkiat.com/html5-battery-status/.

  10. 10.

    https://www.ghostery.com.

  11. 11.

    https://adblockplus.org/.

  12. 12.

    https://www.eff.org/privacybadger.

  13. 13.

    http://www.abine.com/.

  14. 14.

    https://addons.mozilla.org/el/firefox/addon/lightbeam/.

  15. 15.

    https://disconnect.me/.

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Acknowledgment

This work was partially funded by the European Community CEF-TC-2015-1 Safer Internet (grant agreement number INEA/CEF/ICT/A2015/1152069) CYberSafety (http://www.cybersafety.cy/) project.

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Correspondence to Georgia M. Kapitsaki or Theodoros Charalambous .

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Kapitsaki, G.M., Charalambous, T. (2017). PrivacySafer: Privacy Adaptation for HTML5 Web Applications. In: Bouguettaya, A., et al. Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2017. WISE 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10570. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68786-5_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68786-5_20

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