Away From Prying Eyes: Analyzing Usage and Understanding of Private Browsing

被引:0
|
作者
Habib, Hana [1 ]
Colnago, Jessica [1 ]
Gopalakrishnan, Vidya [1 ]
Pearman, Sarah [1 ]
Thomas, Jeremy [1 ]
Acquisti, Alessandro [1 ]
Christin, Nicolas [1 ]
Cranor, Lorrie Faith [1 ]
机构
[1] Carnegie Mellon Univ, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA
基金
美国安德鲁·梅隆基金会; 美国国家科学基金会;
关键词
D O I
暂无
中图分类号
TP [自动化技术、计算机技术];
学科分类号
0812 ;
摘要
Previous research has suggested that people use the private browsing mode of their web browsers to conduct privacy-sensitive activities online, but have misconceptions about how it works and are likely to overestimate the protections it provides. To better understand how private browsing is used and whether users are at risk, we analyzed browsing data collected from over 450 participants of the Security Behavior Observatory (SBO), a panel of users consenting to researchers observing their daily computing behavior "in the wild" through software monitoring. We explored discrepancies between observed and self-reported private behaviors through a follow-up survey, distributed to both Mechanical Turk and SBO participants. The survey also allowed us to investigate why private browsing is used for certain activities. Our findings reveal that people use private browsing for practical and security reasons, beyond the expected privacy reasons. Additionally, the primary use cases for private browsing were consistent across the reported and empirical data, though there were discrepancies in how frequently private browsing is used for online activities. We conclude that private browsing does mitigate our participants' concerns about their browsing activities being revealed to other users of their computer, but participants overestimate the protection from online tracking and targeted advertising.
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页码:159 / 175
页数:17
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