Understanding the Performance Costs and Benefits of Privacy-focused Browser Extensions
Understanding the Performance Costs and Benefits of Privacy-focused Browser Extensions
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了解注重隐私的浏览器扩展的性能成本和优势
DOI：
10.1145/3366423.3380292
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发表时间：
2020
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Feamster, Nick
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Borgolte, Kevin;Feamster, Nick
近年来，广告和行为跟踪已经成为互联网上的一种侵入性滋扰。事实上，隐私倡导者和专业用户认为，这种入侵足以保证使用广告拦截器和反跟踪浏览器扩展。与此同时，世界上最大的广告公司之一谷歌正在开发最流行的浏览器谷歌Chrome。这种利益冲突，即开发浏览器（用户代理）和出于经济动机跟踪用户的在线行为，可能侵犯他们的隐私期望，同时声称自己是“用户代理”，并没有被忽视。事实上，谷歌最近在提议修改Chrome扩展检查和修改请求以“提高扩展性能和隐私”时引发了愤怒，这将使现有的以隐私为重点的扩展无法运行。在本文中，我们分析了bb0 Chrome和Mozilla Firefox这两种市场份额最高的桌面浏览器的八种流行的以隐私为重点的浏览器扩展对浏览器性能的影响。我们通过几个关注用户体验的指标来衡量浏览器性能，比如页面加载时间、获取资源的数量以及响应大小。为了解决广告或跟踪方面的潜在区域差异，例如受欧洲通用数据保护条例（GDPR）的影响，我们从两个有利位置进行了研究，即美利坚合众国和德国。此外，我们还分析了这些扩展如何影响系统性能，特别是CPU时间，它可以作为移动设备电池运行时间的代理指标。与b谷歌声称检查和阻止请求的扩展会对浏览器性能产生负面影响相反，我们发现，与没有扩展的浏览器相比，带有以隐私为中心的请求修改扩展的浏览器在我们的指标上表现相似或更好。事实上，即使是这些扩展的组合，性能也不会比没有任何扩展的浏览器差。我们的研究结果表明，以隐私为中心的扩展不仅可以改善用户的隐私，还可以增加用户的浏览体验。
Advertisements and behavioral tracking have become an invasive nuisance on the Internet in recent years. Indeed, privacy advocates and expert users consider the invasion significant enough to warrant the use of ad blockers and anti-tracking browser extensions. At the same time, one of the largest advertisement companies in the world, Google, is developing the most popular browser, Google Chrome. This conflict of interest, that is developing a browser (a user agent) and being financially motivated to track users’ online behavior, possibly violating their privacy expectations, while claiming to be a ”user agent,” did not remain unnoticed. As a matter of fact, Google recently sparked an outrage when proposing changes to Chrome how extensions can inspect and modify requests to ”improve extension performance and privacy,” which would render existing privacy-focused extensions inoperable.In this paper, we analyze how eight popular privacy-focused browser extensions for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, the two desktop browsers with the highest market share, affect browser performance. We measure browser performance through several metrics focused on user experience, such as page-load times, number of fetched resources, as well as response sizes. To address potential regional differences in advertisements or tracking, such as influenced by the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we perform our study from two vantage points, the United States of America and Germany. Moreover, we also analyze how these extensions affect system performance, in particular CPU time, which serves as a proxy indicator for battery runtime of mobile devices. Contrary to Google’s claims that extensions which inspect and block requests negatively affect browser performance, we find that a browser with privacy-focused request-modifying extensions performs similar or better on our metrics compared to a browser without extensions. In fact, even a combination of such extensions performs no worse than a browser without any extensions. Our results highlight that privacy-focused extensions not only improve users’ privacy, but can also increase users’ browsing experience.
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DOI：
10.1109/eurosp.2017.26
发表时间：
2017-04
期刊：
2017 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P)
影响因子：
--
作者：
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通讯作者：
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DOI：
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发表时间：
2012
期刊：
影响因子：
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DOI：
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发表时间：
2019
期刊：
Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW
影响因子：
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作者：
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DOI：
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发表时间：
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期刊：
影响因子：
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DOI：
--
发表时间：
2019
期刊：
Applied Networking Research Workshop
影响因子：
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作者：
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通讯作者：
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