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

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Privacy Technologies and Policy (APF 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 10518))

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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 assessments creates an incentive for website owners to improve their sites. The public availability of a first version of PrivacyScore was announced at the ENISA Annual Privacy Forum in June 2017.

A German version of this paper with a more detailed discussion of the legal considerations is available at [21].

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Available online at https://privacyscore.org/.

  2. 2.

    See https://github.com/privacyscore.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been co-funded by the DFG as part of project C.1 within the RTG 2050 “Privacy and Trust for Mobile Users”. The authors are grateful to Marvin Hebisch and Nico Vitt, who implemented a prototype, the attendants of the PET-CON 2017.1 workshop, and members of Digitalcourage e. V. for their valuable suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Secure Mobile Networking Lab, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Max Maass

  2. Security in Distributed Systems Group, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Pascal Wichmann, Henning Pridöhl & Dominik Herrmann

Authors
  1. Max Maass
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  2. Pascal Wichmann
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  3. Henning Pridöhl
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  4. Dominik Herrmann
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Max Maass .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Legal Informatics, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Erich Schweighofer

  2. A-SIT, Graz, Austria

    Herbert Leitold

  3. European Union Agency for Network and Information Security, Heraklion, Greece

    Andreas Mitrakas

  4. Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Hessen, Germany

    Kai Rannenberg

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Maass, M., Wichmann, P., Pridöhl, H., Herrmann, D. (2017). PrivacyScore: Improving Privacy and Security via Crowd-Sourced Benchmarks of Websites. In: Schweighofer, E., Leitold, H., Mitrakas, A., Rannenberg, K. (eds) Privacy Technologies and Policy. APF 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10518. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67280-9_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67280-9_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-67279-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-67280-9

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