Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien Magisterarbeit - SemanticLab

In addition, the applied part of this thesis will focus on up-porting 2 and enhancing
an existing add-on 3 for Mozilla Firefox which adds a Platform for Privacy Preference
Project (P3P) functionality to the open source web browser which feature it is currently
lacking.
Taking everything into account one can say that this master thesis has two goals:
1. Based on literature and examples, the topic of privacy while browsing the Internet
should be addressed, threats to privacy should be highlighted and privacy tools
should be evaluated .
2. As a starting point for the Mozilla community to support P3P, an add-on for
Mozilla Firefox should be developed that anticipates the current lack of P3P support
of Firefox.
1.3. Thesis structure
The content of this thesis are web browsing privacy threads and standards, that is which
threats to privacy exists while surfing the Internet and which standards were developed
to hinder such threats. Already existing tools are going to be evaluated and an existing
tool is going to be enhanced as the applied part of this thesis.
Chapter two, 2 Privacy Threads, deals with privacy threats on the Internet. In
particular, general privacy issues are going to be discussed as well as common applications
which require personal data such as e-commerce applications or social network
platforms. In addition, some (technical) background information about privacy on the
Internet will be provided, especially about cookies, Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
and methods for user tracking and profiling.
The next chapter, 3 Privacy Standards, introduces three extensive privacy standards
which were developed by organizations or norming institutions: W3C’s P3P, IBM’s Enterprise
Privacy Authorization Language (EPAL) and OASIS’ eXtensible Access Control
Markup Language (XACML). As parts of this thesis deals with the implementation of
P3P, the emphasis in this chapter lies on the P3P Standard.
In chapter four, 4 Requirements for Privacy Tools, generic software quality requirements
(based on ISO/IEEE standards) are going to be discussed as well as privacy
specific requirements according to literature.
The fifth chapter, 5 Evaluation of Existing Privacy Tools, deals with the actual
evaluation of privacy tools based on the requirements defined in chapter 4. As there
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2 “Up-porting” describes an activity in software engineering where a certain piece of source code is
adopted to a changed (software) environment
3 For the readers’ benefit, the term “add-on” and “extension” will be used exchangeable in this thesis
although strictly seen “extension” is correct