A Usability Study of Doppelganger, A Tool for Better Browser Privacy

The authors present the results of a usability study of Doppelganger, a novel system for managing HTTP cookie policies in a web browser. Doppelganger's goal is to infer personalized, privacy-preserving cookie policies in a mostly automated fashion, interrupting the user only rarely and asking intuitive questions when it does so. Using eighteen subjects, the study compared Doppelganger to two existing browser policies: the Default, allow-all policy, and the Ask policy, which requires users to make cookie decisions manually. They asked subjects to represent the stated privacy preferences of a hypothetical person while they completed a script of common web browsing tasks.