Standard internet browser extensions designed to guard consumer privateness and block on-line adverts are falling quick, in accordance with NYU Tandon College of Engineering researchers, who’re proposing new measurement methodologies to raised uncover and quantify these shortcomings.
Led by Rachel Greenstadt, professor within the NYU Tandon Laptop Science and Engineering (CSE) Division, the crew will current its examine on the nineteenth ACM ASIA Convention on Laptop and Communications Safety, going down July 1–5, 2024 in Singapore.
By way of an evaluation of over 40,000 consumer opinions of seven of the most well-liked privacy-preserving Chrome extensions, the researchers recognized 5 key considerations amongst customers: Efficiency, referring to the extent the extensions slowed down the system; Internet compatibility, indicating how a lot they disrupted web sites or brought on substantial rendering delays; Knowledge and Privateness Coverage, pertaining to how the extensions dealt with consumer knowledge; Effectiveness, evaluating how effectively they fulfilled their marketed goal; and Default Configurations, assessing customers’ belief within the default settings.
“Our examine discovered that there is a disconnect between what customers need and what these extensions are literally offering,” mentioned Ritik Roongta, CSE Ph.D. pupil who’s the lead creator of the examine. “Builders must do a a lot better job of understanding and addressing the real-world ache factors.”
The researchers analyzed extensions that fall into two important teams. The primary class, dubbed “Advert-Blockers & Privateness Safety,” comprised extensions that block commercials and third-party trackers. These embody AdBlock Plus (ABP), uBlock Origin, Adguard, and Ghostery.
The second class, referred to as “Privateness Safety,” encompasses extensions primarily centered on enhancing consumer privateness by blocking trackers and different privacy-invasive parts. This class contains Privateness Badger, Decentraleyes, and Disconnect.
The analysis crew discovered that present tutorial research and benchmarking efforts had comprehensively explored simply 4 out of the 14 key metrics underlying these 5 important consumer considerations. Essential facets like RAM utilization overhead, ad-blocker detection chance, privateness coverage soundness and adequacy of filtering guidelines had been neglected.
To bridge these analysis gaps, the researchers designed novel measurement methodologies and carried out intensive analysis of the extensions towards the unexplored metrics, offering a brand new benchmarking framework for evaluating the strengths and shortcomings of those privateness instruments.
Their experiments concerned good crawlers visiting over 1,500 web sites to investigate efficiency hits, compatibility points, privateness coverage strengths, ad-blocking capabilities and filter record configurations.
Extra info:
Roongta et al. From Consumer Insights to Actionable Metrics: A Consumer-Targeted Analysis of Privateness-Preserving Browser Extensions. (PDF)
Quotation:
Privateness-enhancing browser extensions fail to fulfill consumer wants, new examine finds (2024, June 12)
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