Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien Magisterarbeit - SemanticLab

data can be found over search engines such as Google, Yahoo! or MSN? Of course, most
platforms provide privacy settings to hinder web-crawlers to index such information and
prohibit other users of such platforms to access it without prior consent of the owner.
However, studies show that most users do not know about such issues and platform
providers do not necessarily have the most stringent privacy settings in place by default
[Jon05]. A lot of web users “[...] are posting content online without thinking about the
electronic footprint they leave behind” [Gua07] which can have severe consequences in
the future - think about employers “googleing” you before inviting you to a job interview
or parents taking a look at the latest party pictures of their children.
Methods such as “profiling” and “tracking” enable search engines, web shops and other
companies to create user profiles [Awa06]. With such user profiles, all kind of preferences
of users can be found out and certain conclusions can be drawn. If a user at amazon.com
for example is mainly searching for English science fiction books on Saturday nights,
amazon.com (or their algorithms, respectively) could come to the following conclusions:
• The best way to make sure the advertising on the website has a high conversion
rate is to show advertisements to the user which are related to science fiction
• There will be a higher chance of selling the user another book if it is similar to the
books which were sought for
• The user may not have a lot of social life because he is regularly searching for
books on a Saturday evening
Although the last conclusion may seem a little bit far out, search engines are able to
collect and connect millions of user profiles. Privacy scandals such as AOL’s publication
of search queries plainly show us how much personal information such companies can
generate by connecting information: although the data of AOL was anonymized, everyone
with access to the Internet was able to find out that “AOL user 311045 apparently
owns a Scion XB automobile in need of new brake pads that is in the process of being
upgraded with performance oil filters” or that AOL user 005315 “searched for information
about prison inmates, gang members, sociopaths in relationships, and women who
were murdered in southern California last year” [CNT06]. In a very dramatical way,
such examples highlight the need for privacy on the Internet and the need for ways to
make privacy policies easy to understand for (unexperienced) web users.
1.2. Research question
The thesis addresses the question of how Internet users can make sure that their data is
only used with their knowledge for the purposes they know and approve of. To answer
this question, threats to privacy when browsing the web have to be discussed as well as
common web privacy standards.
The topic of this thesis also specifies a certain need for an applied point of view. For
that reason, requirements for web privacy tools are going to be introduced and such
tools will be evaluated considering these requirements.
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