Protecting Privacy of Web Users: Technical and Legal Perspectives
As millions of users browse the Web on a daily basis, their data is continuously collected by numerous companies and agencies with the help of Web tracking technologies. Website owners, however, need to become compliant with recent EU privacy regulations (such as GDPR and ePrivacy) and often rely on consent banners to either inform users or collect their consent to tracking. In this talk, I discuss our recent research in Web tracking and analysis of consent banners from three dimensions:
1) measurement: detection of Web tracking technologies and analysis of consent banners;
2) compliance: multi-disciplinary discussion with legal scholars about potential violations of GDPR and ePrivacy in the discovered practices, and with design scholar of the manipulative tactics and their legality in consent banners;
3) evidence tools: our recent efforts in building browser extensions and evaluating user studies about consent banners for the regulator.
Finally, we present the impact of our work and underline the need for multi-disciplinary research in the area of Web privacy.