Privacy Preservation in Web Browsers through Privacy Enhancing Tools

Abstract

The Internet has revolutionized the way the world and everything around works. People today find it hard to imagine a world without electronic-mails and search engines where every piece of information is just a few clicks away. The use of social media, online banking services, emails and so on allow for many differernt details concerning our personal life to be stored and used online. Similarly misuse of our data by some unknown organisations is also not in our control. While accessible information about us is growing on the Internet, the potential ways to misuse or exploit them is likewise increasing. This has created privacy concerns and a need for better privacy control for users. It can be concluded from the literature survey, that more research in this area is restricted to conceptualization of privacy than a technological solution. The browsers act as an interface between the users and the Internet, hence more features need to be incorporated into them that can empower the users when interacting with the Internet. This paper emphasizes on the need for designing more privacy enhancing tools using a novel approach called Value Sensitive Design (VSD) which provides methods for creating and assessing a design outcome by taking human ethics into consideration.