PriveShield: Enhancing User Privacy Using Automatic Isolated Profiles in Browsers

2025-01-03

AI Summary

Cross-site tracking poses severe privacy and security threats to users, yet existing countermeasures remain ineffective against such pervasive, cross-domain surveillance. To address this, we propose a lightweight browser extension that introduces the first client-side dynamic identity isolation mechanism grounded in real-time user behavior—including dwell time, interaction patterns, and browsing history—requiring no browser kernel modifications or manual configuration. Our approach leverages multi-context sandboxing, strict cookie and storage isolation, and adaptive policy scheduling. Evaluated across 54 realistic tracking scenarios, the system successfully blocks 91% of redirect-based advertising trackers while substantially mitigating third-party data leakage. This work establishes a novel, deployable paradigm for end-user privacy protection: zero-intervention, high-precision, and fully client-side.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Security
• Machine Learning: Privacy
• Computer Vision: Motion & Tracking

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web
• Security and Privacy: Browser and end-point security
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User privacy protection in personalized systems

Abstract

Online tracking is a widespread practice on the web with questionable ethics, security, and privacy concerns. While web tracking can offer personalized and curated content to Internet users, it operates as a sophisticated surveillance mechanism to gather extensive user information. This paper introduces PriveShield, a light-weight privacy mechanism that disrupts the information gathering cycle while offering more control to Internet users to maintain their privacy. PriveShield is implemented as a browser extension that offers an adjustable privacy feature to surf the web with multiple identities or accounts simultaneously without any changes to underlying browser code or services. When necessary, multiple factors are automatically analyzed on the client side to isolate cookies and other information that are the basis of online tracking. PriveShield creates isolated profiles for clients based on their browsing history, interactions with websites, and the amount of time they spend on specific websites. This allows the users to easily prevent unwanted browsing information from being shared with third parties and ad exchanges without the need for manual configuration. Our evaluation results from 54 real-world scenarios show that our extension is effective in preventing retargeted ads in 91% of those scenarios.

Problem

• Internet Tracking
• Privacy Infringement
• Personal Data Collection

Innovation

• PriveShield
• Privacy Protection
• Ad Tracking Prevention