PriveShield: Enhancing User Privacy Using Automatic Isolated Profiles in Browsers

TL;DR

PriveShield is a browser extension that enhances user privacy by automatically creating isolated profiles to prevent online tracking and retargeted ads, without requiring changes to browser code.

Contribution

It introduces a lightweight, automatic privacy mechanism that isolates user profiles based on browsing behavior to disrupt tracking and improve privacy control.

Findings

Prevents retargeted ads in 91% of tested scenarios

Creates isolated profiles based on browsing history and interactions

Operates without modifications to existing browser infrastructure

Abstract

Online tracking is a widespread practice on the web with questionable ethics, security, and privacy concerns. While web tracking can offer personalized and curated content to Internet users, it operates as a sophisticated surveillance mechanism to gather extensive user information. This paper introduces PriveShield, a light-weight privacy mechanism that disrupts the information gathering cycle while offering more control to Internet users to maintain their privacy. PriveShield is implemented as a browser extension that offers an adjustable privacy feature to surf the web with multiple identities or accounts simultaneously without any changes to underlying browser code or services. When necessary, multiple factors are automatically analyzed on the client side to isolate cookies and other information that are the basis of online tracking. PriveShield creates isolated profiles for clients based on their browsing history, interactions with websites, and the amount of time they spend on specific websites. This allows the users to easily prevent unwanted browsing information from being shared with third parties and ad exchanges without the need for manual configuration. Our evaluation results from 54 real-world scenarios show that our extension is effective in preventing retargeted ads in 91% of those scenarios.