SaTC: CORE: Small: Improving Internet Privacy with Global Privacy Control

随着互联网成为人们生活中越来越重要的一部分，隐私保护也变得越来越重要。为了保护用户的隐私，立法者正在引入新的隐私法。加州消费者隐私法案（CCPA）赋予加州消费者禁止网站向广告商出售其个人信息的权利。其他州和国家也正在引入类似的权利。但是，用户行使这些权利既费时又费力。这个项目正在开发软件，使用户更容易完成这个过程。研究小组正在设计和测试浏览器和其他软件内部的设置，这些设置可以自动向网站发送信号，告知它们不应该出售用户的个人信息。为了帮助浏览器制造商、网站和其他机构采用这种信号，研究小组正在互联网标准组织W3C开发全球隐私控制（GPC）互联网标准。该项目的中心思想是通过规范和实现“不出售”等隐私权，以可用的浏览器和其他软件技术的形式，改善互联网用户的隐私。研究议程包括五个核心研究活动：(1)分析流行网站上当前隐私权实现的合规性和可用性；(2)改进现有实现；(3)在浏览器和其他软件中部署改进后的实现；(4)在W3C标准化GPC以实现广泛采用；(5)为GPC在网络之外的未来扩展提供方向，例如在移动技术中。本研究以软件工程和隐私设计原则为指导。本科生在这个项目中起着至关重要的作用。它旨在培养未来具有社会认知的技术领导者，增加未被充分代表的学生对计算机科学的参与，并在文科中发展计算机科学课程。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

As the Internet is becoming an increasingly bigger part of many peoples' lives, privacy protection is becoming more important as well. To protect the privacy of users, lawmakers are introducing new privacy laws. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) gives California consumers a right to prohibit websites from selling their personal information to advertisers. Similar rights are being introduced in other states and countries. However, it is time-consuming and effortful for users to exercise their rights. This project is developing software for making the process easier for users. The research team is designing and testing settings inside browsers and other software that can be used to automatically send signals to websites informing them that they should not sell the users' personal information. To help adoption of such signals by browser makers, websites, and others, the research team is developing the Global Privacy Control (GPC) Internet standard at the Internet standards organization W3C.The central idea of this project is that Internet users' privacy can be improved by standardizing and implementing Do Not Sell and other privacy rights in the form of usable browser and other software technologies. The research agenda covers five core research activities: (1) analyzing the compliance and usability of current privacy rights implementations on popular websites, (2) improving on existing implementations, (3) deploying the improved implementations in browsers and other software, (4) standardizing GPC at the W3C to achieve wide adoption, and (5) providing directions for future extension of GPC beyond the web, for example, in mobile technologies. The research is guided by software engineering and privacy by design principles. Undergraduate students play a crucial role in the project. It aims to train tomorrow's socially-cognizant tech leaders, increase the participation of underrepresented students in computer science, and evolve the computer science curriculum in the liberal arts.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.