Analysis of Tracker-Blockers Performance
Abstract
The Users are increasingly worried and conscious about privacy issues that appear during browsing the web. Web extensions such as anti-tracking extensions, Ad-blockers, anonymity, and privacy plug-ins. Assure to protect users and their privacy from third-party tracking systems. We introduce the experimental campaign to benchmarking well-known plug-ins for web privacy protection to date in this work. We set up a testbed to automatically browse usual website pages and pick five popular freeware plugins when collecting navigation data. We assessed the collected data to evaluate each plug-in, considering both performance and privacy-protection angles. We found mainly famous tracker-blockers are relatively efficient in detecting as well as blocking third-party trackers. Specifically, by default, Ghostery does not provide protection; if appropriately set enabled, it provides the best protection from third-party trackers (93.99% of third-party trackers blocked). We also assessed the tracker-blockers effectiveness on client web QoE and bandwidth usage. Up to 30% bandwidth usage decreases by enabling tracker-blockers. For example, Ghostery decreases data to download by 40% and Disconnect with a 36.45% reduction. Ghostery is also faster than the baseline, with page loading 32.37% acceleration. Privacy Badger shows a negative effect on load time, with only 4.53% improvement Disconnect and Ghostery provide the best trade-off among web page quality and protection. However, Ghostery requires a manual configuration step to get the best protection from third-party tracking domains, which is difficult for users. Our study allows developers and researchers to understand the Internet's privacy threats better, possibly better performing privacy-preserving tools.
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