PrivacyScore: Improving Privacy and Security via Crowd-Sourced Benchmarks of Websites

Max Maass, Dominik Herrmann

Abstract

Website owners make conscious and unconscious decisions that affect their users, potentially exposing them to privacy and security risks in the process. In this paper we introduce PrivacyScore, an automated website scanning portal that allows anyone to benchmark security and privacy features of multiple websites. In contrast to existing projects, the checks implemented in PrivacyScore cover a wider range of potential privacy and security issues. Furthermore, users can control the ranking and analysis methodology. Therefore, PrivacyScore can also be used by data protection authorities to perform regularly scheduled compliance checks. In the long term we hope that the transparency resulting from the published benchmarks creates an incentive for website owners to improve their sites. We plan to announce the public availability of a first version of PrivacyScore at the Annual Privacy Forum in June 2017.

Publication
Preproceedings of ENISA Annual Privacy Forum, 7–8 June 2017, Vienna. Preprint, arXiv:1705.05139 [cs.CR], 2017.
Date
May, 2017