An official website of the United States government
Abstract Over half of all visits to websites now take place in a mobile browser, yet the majority of web privacy studies take the vantage point of desktop browsers, use emulated mobile browsers, or focus on just a single mobile browser instead. In this paper, we present a comprehensive web-tracking measurement study on mobile browsers and privacy-focused mobile browsers. Our study leverages a new web measurement infrastructure, OmniCrawl, which we develop to drive browsers on desktop computers and smartphones located on two continents. We capture web tracking measurements using 42 different non-emulated browsers simultaneously. We find that the third-party advertising and tracking ecosystem of mobile browsers is more similar to that of desktop browsers than previous findings suggested. We study privacy-focused browsers and find their protections differ significantly and in general are less for lower-ranked sites. Our findings also show that common methodological choices made by web measurement studies, such as the use of emulated mobile browsers and Selenium, can lead to website behavior that deviates from what actual users experience.
more »
« less
The Importance of Web Browser Security and Privacy
Web Browsers have storage components and external software that aid in creating an enjoyable and functioning browser experience. Web browser history, cookies, ActiveX controls, and extensions all have vulnerabilities that are exploited by hackers, websites, and the web browsers themselves. Users are putting themselves at risk for an attack on their browser, possibly even their systems if they do not take the proper actions to secure their browser and keep their information private. This paper will discuss the aspects of the web browser named above, their security issues, and what can be done to stay protected.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1754054
- PAR ID:
- 10284701
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ADMI 2021: The Symposium of Computing at Minority Institutions
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
This report will analyze issues related to web browser security and privacy. The web browser applications that will be looked at are Google Chrome, Bing, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Safari, and Opera. In recent months web browsers have increased the number of daily users. With the increase in daily users who may not be as well versed in data security and privacy, comes an increase in attacks. This study will discuss the pros and cons of each web browser, how many have been hacked, how often they have been hacked, why they have been hacked, security flaws, and more. The study utilizes research and a user survey to make a proper analysis and provide recommendations on the topic.more » « less
-
Alkan, Can (Ed.)Abstract MotivationGenome browsers are an essential tool in genome analysis. Modern genome browsers enable complex and interactive visualization of a wide variety of genomic data modalities. While such browsers are very powerful, they can be challenging to configure and program for bioinformaticians lacking expertise in web development. ResultsWe have developed an R package that provides an interface to the JBrowse 2 genome browser. The package can be used to configure and customize the browser entirely with R code. The browser can be deployed from the R console, or embedded in Shiny applications or R Markdown documents. Availability and implementationJBrowseR is available for download from CRAN, and the source code is openly available from the Github repository at https://github.com/GMOD/JBrowseR/.more » « less
-
Online trackers are invasive as they track our digital footprints, many of which are sensitive in nature, and when aggregated over time, they can help infer intricate details about our lifestyles and habits. Although much research has been conducted to understand the effectiveness of existing countermeasures for the desktop platform, little is known about how mobile browsers have evolved to handle online trackers. With mobile devices now generating more web traffic than their desktop counterparts, we fill this research gap through a large-scale comparative analysis of mobile web browsers. We crawl 10K valid websites from the Tranco list on real mobile devices. Our data collection process covers both popular generic browsers (e.g., Chrome, Firefox, and Safari) as well as privacy-focused browsers (e.g., Brave, Duck Duck Go, and Firefox-Focus). We use dynamic analysis of runtime execution traces and static analysis of source codes to highlight the tracking behavior of invasive fingerprinters. We also find evidence of tailored content being served to different browsers. In particular, we note that Firefox Focus sees altered script code, whereas Brave and Duck Duck Go have highly similar content. To test the privacy protection of browsers, we measure the responses of each browser in blocking trackers and advertisers and note the strengths and weaknesses of privacy browsers. To establish ground truth, we use well-known block lists, including EasyList, EasyPrivacy, Disconnect and WhoTracksMe and find that Brave generally blocks the highest number of content that should be blocked as per these lists. Focus performs better against social trackers, and Duck Duck Go restricts third-party trackers that perform email-based tracking.more » « less
-
Fodor, Anthony (Ed.)ABSTRACT Are two adjacent genes in the same operon? What are the order and spacing between several transcription factor binding sites? Genome browsers are software data visualization and exploration tools that enable biologists to answer questions such as these. In this paper, we report on a major update to our browser, Genome Explorer, that provides nearly instantaneous scaling and traversing of a genome, enabling users to quickly and easily zoom into an area of interest. The user can rapidly move between scales that depict the entire genome, individual genes, and the sequence; Genome Explorer presents the most relevant detail and context for each scale. By downloading the data for the entire genome to the user’s web browser and dynamically generating visualizations locally, we enable fine control of zoom and pan functions and real-time redrawing of the visualization, resulting in smoother and more intuitive exploration of a genome than is possible with other browsers. Further, genome features are presented together, in-line, using familiar graphical depictions. In contrast, many other browsers depict genome features using data tracks, which have low information density and can visually obscure the relative positions of features. Genome Explorer diagrams have a high information density that provides larger amounts of genome context and sequence information to be presented in a given-sized monitor than for tracks-based browsers. Genome Explorer provides optional data tracks for the analysis of large-scale data sets and a unique comparative mode that aligns genomes at orthologous genes with synchronized zooming. IMPORTANCEGenome browsers provide graphical depictions of genome information to speed the uptake of complex genome data by scientists. They provide search operations to help scientists find information and zoom operations to enable scientists to view genome features at different resolutions. We introduce the Genome Explorer browser, which provides extremely fast zooming and panning of genome visualizations and displays with high information density.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
