Measuring Privacy Loss and the Impact of Privacy Protection in Web Browsing

Various bits of information about users accessing Web sites. some of which are private, have been gathered since the inception of the Web. Increasingly the gathering, aggregation, and processing has been outsourced to third parties. The goal of this work is to examine the effectiveness of specific techniques to limit this diffusion of private information to third parties. The authors also examine the impact of these privacy protection techniques on the usability and quality of the Web pages returned.