An Investigation of User Privacy and Data Protection on User-Side Storage

Abstract

Along with the introduction of HTML5, a new user storage technologies; particularly, Web SQL Database, Web Storage, and Indexed Database API have emerged. The common goal of these storage technologies is to overcome the limitations of legacy of user-side storage mechanisms. All these technologies have many privacy and security concerns, and the main threat is user tracking. In this context, this study investigates the usage of these technologies and to find out which one of these technologies is primarily used by user trackers, and to calculate their frequency in context of 3rd-party tracking code. The result exposes that the adoption of Web Storage most commonly used amongst the three storage technologies. Motivated by the investigation results, this study examines the degree of protection which the popular web browsers supply to prevent privacy violations. The result reveals that the protection mechanisms that are provided by web browsers are almost the same, and in many occasions privacy violations do exist