A personalized approach to web privacy: awareness, attitudes and actions

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to take a novel approach to help users better understand and be more aware of what third parties are learning about them as they browse the web.

Design/methodology/approach

The approach the authors take is to personalize the awareness by using JavaScript embedded in a web page to examine portions of a user's web‐browser history in order to ascertain web sites that the user has visited. The authors then personalize information reported to the user about what third‐party sites are tracking the user's behavior along with demographic information these sites may be inferring from these visited sites and the user's geographic location.

Findings

It was found that 63 percent of users agreed with a statement of concern for third parties monitoring activities, about half of the respondents agreed with a concern for knowledge about a user's location and a little more than half agreed to concern about inference of demographic information. It was found that females are more concerned about these issues than males. In terms of possible actions, a majority of users report using an ad blocker tool and even more delete cookies at least some amount of time. Using an opt‐out mechanism or removing browser history is done by less than 20 percent of users. Despite expressing more concern for information known by third parties, females are not significantly more likely to take actions that may limit what is leaked to these third parties. A contributor to this discrepancy is that females were much less likely to know their settings for many of the actions, indicating less familiarity with them.

Social implications

Web privacy is an important social issue so helping users to better understand tracking of their actions, along with what actions can be taken to limit tracking, is important.

Originality/value

The paper takes an original approach to helping users understand what third parties learn about them and follows up that approach with a survey of user attitudes and actions on this important topic.

Citation

Wills, C.E. and Zeljkovic, M. (2011), "A personalized approach to web privacy: awareness, attitudes and actions", Information Management & Computer Security, Vol. 19 No. 1, pp. 53-73. https://doi.org/10.1108/09685221111115863