# PrivacyScore: Improving Privacy and Security via Crowd-Sourced Benchmarks of Websites

## TL;DR

PrivacyScore is an automated, crowd-sourced benchmarking platform that assesses website privacy and security features, aiming to incentivize improvements through transparency and customizable analysis.

## Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive, user-controllable website scanning tool that covers a broader range of privacy and security issues than existing solutions.

## Key findings

- First public release announced at ENISA Privacy Forum 2017
- Enables regular compliance checks for authorities
- Aims to motivate website improvements through transparency

## Abstract

Website owners make conscious and unconscious decisions that affect their users, potentially exposing them to privacy and security risks in the process. In this paper we introduce PrivacyScore, an automated website scanning portal that allows anyone to benchmark security and privacy features of multiple websites. In contrast to existing projects, the checks implemented in PrivacyScore cover a wider range of potential privacy and security issues. Furthermore, users can control the ranking and analysis methodology. Therefore, PrivacyScore can also be used by data protection authorities to perform regularly scheduled compliance checks. In the long term we hope that the transparency resulting from the published benchmarks creates an incentive for website owners to improve their sites. The public availability of a first version of PrivacyScore was announced at the ENISA Annual Privacy Forum in June 2017.