Bachelor thesis Computing Science Radboud University Comparing privacy plugins Author: First supervisor/assessor: Nick Nibbeling Dr. Veelasha Moonsamy s4616146
[email protected] Second supervisor: Dr. Ir. Hugo (H.L.) Jonker
[email protected] June 25, 2019 This page intentionally left blank Abstract In today's society, be tracked on the internet is no longer a particular case. Web tracking techniques keep tabs on the user's internet activity while the user is probably not aware of it. In recent years, many new tracking tech- niques have been added, and this will only become more. Privacy plugins such as Ghostery and Privacy Badger protect you against third-party track- ers on the internet. In this study, we analyze privacy plugins by making a two-part comparison. First, we collect general information about every plugin and compare them with each other. Second, we test the performance of the privacy plugins on a large scale of 25,000 popular websites. We do this by retrieving the number of blocked domains/request directly from the privacy plugin itself. We have not seen this in any other study so far. The goal of this two-part comparison is to provide advice to the end-user, so he or she knows which plugin to pick. We have concluded that algorithm- based plugins have an advantage compared to blacklists-based plugins in theory. We also have statistics on the performances of the privacy plugins in practice. These results are used for the recommendation. Contents 1 Introduction 3 2 What is Privacy? 6 2.1 Laws affecting privacy .