User Attitudes Towards Browsing Data Collection

Web browsing data is the foundation of online advertising and can also be used to understand behavioral patterns of web users. This data, however, has also been the source of pervasive privacy concerns. In this paper we probed the sources of the underlying privacy concerns. Through user studies, we investigated the level of concern with URL collection compared to higher-level profiling into interest or preference categories. Consistent with intuition and industry practice, our results indicate that most users do indeed find URLs much more sensitive than the profiles built from them. Interestingly, however, we found that a great challenge in this area is comprehension of what categorization actually means, which is essential to properly make privacy decisions when services collect categories rather than URLs. This paper also investigated whether certain categories may also be a source of privacy concern. We tested sensitivity of a range of categories. Most categories were considered sensitive by relatively few users, and the categories deemed sensitive followed a power-law distribution.