Privacy scoring and users´ awareness for Web tracking

Web tracking raises a potential privacy concern since users´ browsing activities and personal information are collected and revealed to third parties without the users´ consent. The emergence of new pervasive systems offers opportunities to widen “traditional” Web to the world of pervasive devices. In this paper, we revisit the problem of Web tracking. We propose an intuitive scoring model to measure the users´ privacy risk when they are browsing the Web. We present a Firefox add-on which computes the scores of visited Webpages and provides users´ awareness about how there are tracked on the Web. We distributed this add-on to two sets of Tunisian volunteers (students and researchers). We analyze the statistical results of the collected datasets and show that the users´ behavior, the trackers and tracking components can increase the risk of privacy violations on the Web.