Mobile Code for Enhancing Privacy on the Internet: an Extensible Filtering Proxy Approach

摘要

Whereas mobile code may be misused and lead to leakage of sensitive personal information out to the Internet, it may also be exploited as Privacy Enhancing Technology (PET). This paper presents such an application in the form of a fully user-configurable and extensible filtering proxy for the world-wide web. This approach allows the user to freely specify and dynamically update his privacy preferences, without being limited by particular browser implementations. Its goal is also to implement high-level policies, and to hide as much as possible all technology-specific settings (such as enabling or disabling cookies, scripts, P3P preferences, etc.) in favour of more intuitive criteria such as the confidence level that the user is willing to grant to each website.