With the increase of requesting personal information online, unauthorized disclosure of user privacy is a significant problem faced by today's Internet. As a typical identity theft, phishing usually employs fraudulent emails and spoofed web sites to trick unsuspecting users into divulging their private information. Even legitimate web sites may collect private information from unsophisticated users such as children for commercial purposes without their parents' consent. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998 was enacted in reaction to the widespread collection of information from children and subsequent abuses identified by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). COPPA is aimed at protecting child's privacy by requiring parental consent before collecting information from children under thirteen. In this thesis, we propose two solutions for ensuring user online privacy. By analyzing common characteristics of phishing pages, we propose a client-side tool, Trident, which works as a browser plug-in for filtering phishes. The experiment results show that Trident can identify 98-99% online and valid phishing pages, as well as automatically validate legitimate pages. To protect child's privacy, we introduce the POCKET (parental online consent on kids' electronic privacy) framework, which is a technically feasible and legally sound solution to enforce COPPA. Parents answer a questionnaire on their privacy requirements and the POCKET user agent generates a privacy preferences file. Meantime, the merchants are required to possess a privacy policy that is authenticated by a trusted third party. Only web sites that possess and adhere to their privacy policies are allowed to collect child's information; web sites whose policies do not match the client's preferences are blocked. POCKET framework incorporates a transaction protocol to secure the data exchange between an authenticated client and a POCKET-compliant merchant. / Master of Science

A frame refers to a decision maker’s perception of a decision problem. Frames affect outcomes of decisions and are partially controlled by how decision problems are formulated. This study investigated the effect of framing alternatives in a privacy decision as gaining or losing value, need to make an effort and gaining control in an online environment. Also a structure among the many effects found in earlier research concerning privacy in the context of Internet based services was sought. For these purposes two experiments and one survey were conducted at a university in Sweden. The study included 238 individuals, 197 of them being in the age range of 19-30. The participants were approached in public areas at the University and were asked to register on a fictive online cloud service. During registration they got a choice of registering automatically with little control and manually with control over what information would be published. The most salient effect found was the impact of framing the low control alternative as time saving, meaning that the participants were willing to give up privacy to save time. The practical implication of these results would be for developers of new online services to focus on making it easy and time efficient to take control over private information. For value and control frames no significant effects were found. Also exploring the result of the survey, a structure with the two components online concern and willingness to take risk online were found.

Search engines have become integral to the way in which we use the Web of today. Not only are they an important real time source of links to relevant information, but they also serve as a starting point to the Web. A veritable treasure trove of the latest news, satellite images, directions from anywhere to anywhere, local traffic updates and global trends ranging from the spread of influenza to which celebrity happens to be the most popular at a particular time. The more popular search engines are collecting incredible amounts of information. In addition to indexing significant portions of the Web they record what hundreds of millions of users around the world are searching for. As more people use a particular search engine, it has the potential to record more information on what is deemed relevant (and in doing so provide better relevance in the future, thereby attracting more users). Unfortunately, the relevance derived from this cycle between the search user and the search engine comes at a cost: privacy. In this work, we take an in depth look at what privacy means within the context of search. We discuss why it is that the search engine must be considered a threat to search privacy. We then investigate potential solutions and eventually propose our own in a bid to enhance search privacy. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Computer Science / unrestricted

Live customer service has been used by many e-commerce brands as a method to gain consumers personal information. Previous research has found that live service agents have a positive influence on consumer perceived service quality and trust. This research aims to examine if certain type of live customer service generate better website and brand perceptions from the consumer and ultimately help in gaining consumer personal information. Results of this experimental design show that avatar selection and exposure did not significantly differ for service quality, trust, attitudes, purchase intention, and likelihood of disclosing personal information. It was also found that customers have a significant likelihood of selecting agents of the same gender. / text

The following report is an examination of consumer tracking and profiling in the United States. The paper presents perspectives on the current discussion surrounding regulation of consumer tracking. It begins with an explanation of the evolution of tracking technologies and tracking prevention tools. This is followed by a discussion of the outcomes of self-regulatory initiatives, as well as existing regulatory efforts from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and standardization initiatives from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This background information is used to examine “specialty consumer reporting agency” Web sites, information brokers that exist solely to create profiles about individuals and sell these profiles online. This research presents a content analysis of privacy policies for 29 of these Web sites. Specifically, the content analysis focuses on the legal language they use in their presentation of Federal Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) disclaimers, the listed sources of their information, and their instructions for users to correct or remove their information. The conclusion from the findings is that many of these Web sites are engaging in deceptive practices as defined by the FTC. As a solution, the FTC could enforce FCRA requirements on these Web sites by requiring that consumers be able to access this information, dispute inaccurate information, understand how their information is gathered and used, and opt out of having a profile completely. The FTC also can create a centralized Web site where specialty consumer reporting agencies identify themselves to consumers, describe how they collect and use consumer data, and detail the access rights and other choices they provide with respect to the consumer data they maintain. Finally, the paper concludes with a summary of online privacy initiatives in the European Union, and an explanation of the requirements of United States compliance with these policies when taking part in the European marketplace. / text

People value their privacy; however, they typically do not make the protection of their privacy a priority. Privacy is oftentimes not tangible, complicating the efforts of technology users to express and act according to their privacy needs. Additionally, people may not be fully aware of the risks they are subjecting themselves to once they use the Internet for financial transactions, or create profiles on online social networks. Companies post privacy policies inform people about their informational practices; but, this information is extremely difficult to use and typically not considered in users’ decision-making processes. Privacy concerns have also had an impact on users’ adoption of new technologies that share personal information. A plethora of mobile location-finding technologies applications have become available over the last two decades, but the products and services offered by the technology developers may not comprehensively address the privacy implications and privacy concerns surrounding their use. The design considerations for these products may not provide the necessarily amount of control or risk mitigation for users to ensure that their location information is not misused. In this thesis, I focus on the impact of salient privacy information on privacy concerns and behavior in two contexts: online shopping and the use of a mobile-location sharing technology. I examine several case studies focusing on the evolution of privacy attitudes after people use specific technologies. Based on the examination of the use of a location-sharing system, I highlight several design considerations for mobile-location application developers to ensure they address their users privacy concerns. I use the results of online surveys and user studies to provide concrete information on the impact of feedback on the comfort with using location-sharing technology. This research shows that users will pay a premium to purchase from websites that offer better privacy policies IF that privacy information is made visible and understandable. This research points to the importance of control in the management of privacy concerns. Whether it be mandated by legislation, or recommended in industry standards or design standards, offering users control in the form of understandable privacy policy information, or control over the disclosure of personal information by technology, is essential.

There is growing concern over online privacy in today’s digital worlds, in part due to the nature of social media, which encourages the disclosure of personal information. Such concerns have resulted in a significant amount of research, so far focused on adults’ and teenagers’ perceptions of privacy and privacy management. This study aims to explore how children perceive online privacy. It addresses three research questions: RQ 1: What are children’s views of online privacy? RQ 2: What are parents’ views of online privacy? Do their views on privacy influence how they deal with their children’s privacy? RQ 3: What are the benefits and disadvantages of different Internet parental mediation strategies for children’s online privacy? Twenty-six semi-structured one-to-one interviews and ten focus group sessions were conducted with fifty-seven pupils aged 9 to 11 years old (Primary 6 and Primary 7), from one school in Scotland. Additionally, 8 parents were interviewed to understand how their perceptions of privacy influenced their Internet parenting strategies. This study has three overarching findings. The first overarching finding is related to children’s and parents’ views about the Internet as an unsafe place, occasionally leading parents to deploy restrictive and monitoring Internet parental mediation strategies. Second, children view privacy as more difficult to achieve online than offline for two main reasons: (1) the Internet is a ‘bigger space’ populated by a massive number of ‘people’, most of whom they do not know nor have they ever seen (‘strangers’), and (2) there are certain difficulties in managing the privacy settings of social networking sites. The third finding is that trust, autonomy and privacy are interrelated. Trust reduce privacy concerns, encouraged for two-way information sharing between children and parents, with an expectation that parents will be able to help identify potential and also unexpected online issues, and necessary advice and safety precautions can be taught to children. As a result, children will potentially be able to manage their online activities in an increasingly autonomous way. Trust is important not only in interpersonal relationships, but also for building confidence for contexts in which we do not have any prior knowledge, such as with strangers or with the providers of online platforms.

Online privacy has become one of the greatest concerns in the United States today. There are currently multiple stakeholders with interests in online privacy including the public, industry, and the United States government. This study examines the issues surrounding the protection of online privacy. Privacy laws in the United States are currently outdated and do little to protect online privacy. These laws are unlikely to be changed as both the government and industry have interests in keeping these privacy laws lax. To bridge the gap between the desired level of online privacy and what is provided legally users may turn to technological solutions.

The goal of the diploma thesis is to analyze the situation of behavioral targeted advertising in the Czech Internet market, assess its potential in the future and evaluate the effectiveness of behavioral targeting on the Czech market. This thesis is focused first on the Internet advertising market, media planning, explanation of selected targeting approaches and on detailed description of the behaviorally targeted ads including the online privacy issue. In the practical part analysis of the behavioral targeted advertising on the Czech market through expert interviews and evaluation of the effectiveness of behavioral targeting on an example of an advertising campaign of selected company is to be found.

Online communities are growing at a phenomenal rate and with the large number of users these communities contain, attackers are drawn to exploit these users. Denial of information (DoI) attacks and information leakage attacks are two popular attacks that target users on online communities. These information based attacks are linked by their opposing views on low-quality information. On the one hand denial of information attacks which primarily use low-quality information (such as spam and phishing) are a nuisance for information consumers. On the other hand information leakage attacks, which use inadvertently leaked information, are less effective when low-quality information is used, and thus leakage of low-quality information is prefered by private information producers. In this dissertation, I introduce techniques for preventing abuse against these attacks in online communities using meta-model classification and information unification approaches, respectively. The meta-model classification approach involves classifying the ``connected payload" associated with the information and using the classification result for the determination. This approach allows for detection of DoI attacks in emerging domains where the amount of information may be constrained. My information unification approach allows for modeling and mitigating information leakage attacks. Unifying information across domains followed by a quantificiation of the information leaked, provides one of the first studies on users' susceptibality to information leakage attacks. Further, the modeling introduced allows me to quantify the reduced threat of information leakage attacks after applying information cloaking.