Browser Privacy Design

While there is more tracking of users' online behavior & collection of their personal data, there is no tool to easily determine who is being sent users' information or what information they collect.

Our project aims to build a browser based tool for visualizing trackers' accumulation as the user browses, with excellent user interfaces and straightforward ways to blacklist or whitelist the trackers.

The tracker visualization will appear in the browser's theme & it will grow as the user browses and more sites track her. The theme visualization will be ambient enough not to overly distract the user while they are browsing, but it will be noticeable enough as the accumulation happens that the user can get a sense of how many trackers are currently watching her. It will build off of the current Firefox plug-in Collusion. Whenever she likes, she can click the plugin icon to go from the ambient visual to a dashboard, showing a full map of all the sites that are tracking them, and giving them the opportunity to delete, blacklist, or whitelist each site.

We assume that not many users will go to the trouble of installing our plug-in, but those that do will be privacy super-users: knowledgeable about online behavior tracking and concerned to control it. We hope to gather their preferences (if they consent to it) about which sites to black- or whitelist, and then use this to build a robust qualitative database of trackers.

This database could then be bundled into browsers -- not as a plug-in but as an option within the browser's 'Settings' dialog box -- to let non-superusers simply click "block trackers on the Master Blacklist". We hope to harness the informed preferences of the superusers to let non-superusers control tracking with the least amount of effort.