A Personalized Approach to Web Privacy - Awareness, Attitudes and Actions

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to take a novel approach to help users better understand and be more aware of what third parties are learning about them as they browse the web.Design/methodology/approach – The approach the authors take is to personalize the awareness by using JavaScript embedded in a web page to examine portions of a user's web‐browser history in order to ascertain web sites that the user has visited. The authors then personalize information reported to the user about what third‐party sites are tracking the user's behavior along with demographic information these sites may be inferring from these visited sites and the user's geographic location.Findings – It was found that 63 percent of users agreed with a statement of concern for third parties monitoring activities, about half of the respondents agreed with a concern for knowledge about a user's location and a little more than half agreed to concern about inference of demographic information. It was found that females are more con...

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